The Right to Infrastructure

Danielle Purifoy and Louise Seamster present their conceptual framework for understanding black towns within extractive white space, highlighting questions of citizenship, extraction, and exclusion as they focus on how legal, spatial, racial, and economic systems structure black spaces’ access to infrastructure and facilitate environmental violence. Their work combines an environmental focus with data and frameworks from urban studies, fiscal sociology, geography, and law to show how these harms are not the result of discrete “racist” acts, but are written into the law itself, and are central to the functioning of racial capitalism. Purifoy and Seamster will be introduced by Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture and Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia GSAPP.