Cities as Fragmented and Divided

This episode discusses cities as being fragmented and divided—stressed and dystopian urban environments, places rendered irreconcilable by ideology, religion, or ethnicity. His discussion is highly charged, employing terms such as ghetto, apartheid, and redlining. It conjures an urban image shaped not only by walls and barbed wire fences, but also by invisible virtual or administrative borders. Names like Berlin, Belfast, Soweto, Harlem, Jim Crow, and Gaza evoke powerful images of conflict and separation in the urban realm. This is contrasted with cities separated from their surroundings by protective walls, or with twin cities united—such as Budapest or Minneapolis–St Paul—and the tendency ofmetropolises to absorb and connect villages, with London and Tokyo as prime examples. We must also acknowledge that this conversation takes place on a city grid built upon unceded land, shaped by the displacement of its original custodians. Australian cities once operated under formal apartheid systems—for example,Perth's CBD exclusion zone forAboriginal people, which existed until 1954, and 'Boundary Streets' that demarcated Indigenous from non-Indigenous areas. Hamann also speaks of both vertical and horizontal urban divisions: the stratification within a tower's section—where height corresponds to class—and the horizontalfragmentation caused by urban infrastructure such as freeways. What is often most striking is the capacity of a city's inhabitants to ignore, or be wilfully blind to, such stark divisions. These borders, though extreme, are frequently invisible. Check out the references from this episode.