Centralising

Accumulating, dispossessing, gentrifying, whitening, ethnicising, arting, theming, consuming

Centres, margins, creative precincts, tourisms, zones, frontiers, uptowns, downtowns

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Architecture and planning are deeply imbricated in the design of centrality: of city centres, public squares, museums, urban precincts and tourist zones that make up a global validation of centres and invalidation of margins. These practices of rendering places as central are part of a political economy of design and evaluation that are invested in questions of not only what matters, but by extension, who matters. Centres are imagined, marketed and surveilled for a particular kind of citizen and associated behaviours of consumption. While often unspoken, the actively designed process of centralising can be imbued in racial hierarchy as well as the production of ethno-nationalisms. This frame of centralising brings to the fore the political economy of ‘whiteness’ and ethno-nationalism, questioning its mechanisms of production along with how it is challenged in everyday life.

Film/ Fiction/ Visualisations

Freidrichs, Chad. 2011. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [Film].


Julien, Isaac. 1989. Looking for Langston [Film].


McKay, Claude. 1922. Harlem Shadows.


Vladislavic, Ivan. 2006. Portrait with Keys: Joburg & What-What. Johannesburg: Umuzi.

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Core Texts

Jazeel, Tariq. 2011. “Spatialising Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking Planetary Futures.” Theory, Culture & Society. 28:5, 75-97.


Kincaid, Jamaica. 1988. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Loo, Yat Ming. 2013. Architecture and Urban Form in Kuala Lumpur. London: Ashgate.


Roy, Ananya. 2018. “ At the Limits of Urban Theory: Racial Banishment in the Contemporary City.” [Podcast and video] 

Yeah, Brenda S.A., and Kong, Lily. The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Constructions of “Nation”. NewYork: Syracuse University Press.

​More Reading

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Battle-Baptiste, Whitney and Rusert, Britt (eds.). 2018. W.E.B Du Bois Data Portraits: Visualising Black America. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. [See also Library of Congress for images]

Bou Akar, Hiba. 2018. For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. Stanford: Stanford University Press.


Elshahed, Mohamed. 2015. “The Prospects of Gentrification in Downtown Cairo: Artists, Private Investment and the Neglectful State.” Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement, edited by Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales. Bristol: Policy Press, 121-142.

Hasdell, Peter and Betancour, Ana. 1998. “Tango: A Choreography of Urban Displacement” White Papers, Black Marks, edited by Lesley Lokko. London: The Athlone Press, 146 - 175.

Kobayashi, Audrey and Peake, Linda. 2000.“Racism out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millenium,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 90:2, 392 - 403.

Hunter, Marcus Anthony, and Robinson, Zandria. 2018. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Jackson, Emma. 2019. “Valuing the Bowling Alley: Contestations over the Preservation of Spaces of Everyday Urban Multiculture in London.” The Sociological Review. 67:1, 79-94.

Perera, Jessica. 2019.“The London Clearances: Race, Housing and Policing.” Institute of Race Relations, Background Paper no.12.

Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. 2011. Harlem is Nowhere. London: Granta Books.


Rolnik, Raquel. 2019. Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance [Translated by Felipe Hirschhorn]. London: Verso.

Secor, Anna. 2002. “There is an Istanbul that belongs to me”: Citizenship, Space, and Identity in the City.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94:2, 352-368.


Shaw, Wendy S. 2011. Cities of Whiteness. London: John Wiley & Sons.

Shildrick, Tracy. 2018. “Lessons from Grenfell: Poverty Propaganda, Stigma and Class Power.” The Sociological Review. 66:4, 783–798.

Tyler, Imogen. 2018. “Resituating Erving Goffman: From Stigma Power to Black Power.” The Sociological Review. 66:4, 744-765.