The thing that fucks me up about North American city planning is not just that it’s ugly or that it sucks, but the knowledge of what it took to seize the land and seize the money to build it in the first place. The US enslaved millions, committed genocide against an entire continent to take the land from people who had lived there for millennia, committed coups and invaded nations on every other continent, destabilizing governments and fanning the flames of war and destruction worldwide, threatened to engulf the globe and nuclear hellfire and boil the oceans, all in the name of profit. And after all of that, it was for this?
All of that blood spilled for strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs, entire belts of the country of which are now empty and rotting because everybody left? So much unspeakable violence to halt anyone from challenging the shape of society and the hierarchy of domination, and of all things it was done in the name of, it was this? A way of living that people aren’t even happy with? So many cultures and languages, thousands of years of history passed from one generation to another, were uprooted and tried to extinguish, for shopping malls that didn’t last even a single lifetime? There is nothing that would have been worth what imperialism has done to the world, but it’s spaces like these which, to me, are even more emblematic of the structural myopic selfishness of capitalism that spurred on all of that violence than the tacky opulence of any billionaire.
Even at home, that these endless suburbs were built for white Americans fleeing from having to share cities with non-white neighbors. All the billions of tax dollars spent to employ white supremacist cops to surveil, harass, kill, cram into overcrowded prisons and immigrant concentration camps, so many countless people of color, spurred on by racist fear that they might somehow threaten this.
All of that to create and maintain a society of alienated and isolated would-be monarchs living in flimsy little plywood and plaster castles filled with an endless stream of toys that will be shortly forgotten and thrown away, surrounded by miles and miles of empty featureless places which only exist to give them warehouse sized concrete boxes full of collections of shelves from which to select from ten dozen nearly identical types of bland home goods to spend their money on.
Make no mistake, no individual or even large group of individuals in the suburbs caused this on their own. It is not the vague specter of consumerism or personal spending habits that created this. It is the product of the way our whole society was built and shaped by capitalist white supremacy. The same fundamental logic is true of Europe and every other imperialist project, too, even if it hides it better behind a prettier facade or a better set of social welfare options. This is just the naked face of it laid stark and bare.
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