At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, legal scholar Deborah N. Archer delivered the lecture “Transportation Infrastructure and Race in American Cities,” reframing infrastructure as a central civil rights issue.
Archer argues that racism is enforced not only socially but spatially—through decisions about where people can live, move, and gather. Drawing on her recent book, Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality, Archer argued that transportation systems do more than connect A to B: they shape access to education, opportunity, and political life. “Transportation infrastructure determines who gets locked out, who gets left behind, who gets access,” she explains, “who lives with dignity and respect and who doesn’t.”
If infrastructure organizes everyday life at this scale, then its design becomes a question of justice. How might rethinking these systems begin to repair the inequities they have long produced?
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Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture
Deborah N. Archer “Transportation, Infrastructure, and Race in American Cities”