A swastika composed of our nation’s Stars and Stripes fluttered on a fraying flag amidst Trump banners. I spotted this abhorrence on a trailer en route to Cleveland via Interstate 71 as my son and I drove cross country this past June, after looping through the breathtaking deserts and mountains of the American West, then east across amber Kansas plains, over the mighty Mississippi, and into the industrial Midwest. Unlike our 2021 cross-country sojourn, we saw far fewer Trump signs this year until we arrived in purple and blue states. The fervor for Trump seems to have waned in ruby red America—at least prior to the tragic recent attempts on his life—replaced by a longstanding cultural default to quietly vote Republican. As the nice young man in the RV service center I was so lucky to find in rural Utah quipped, unsolicited, “My grandparents never talked about who they voted for, and neither do I.”
Were this only as true in Long Island, western Massachusetts, or any place else in our nation where blue and red pixels share borders. Apparently it is proximity that prompts the need for being in each other’s faces politically. After all, what’s the point of “owning the libs” if there are none around to own? But instead, what if neighborhoods of diverse peoples and politics could become places of understanding rather than platforms for animus? What if the commons could enable us to recall what we share in common?
This is precisely why the architecture of our communities—the design of their character and culture—matters to our political discourse. I am an urban architect who in the last five decades has traversed this country six times as a brown person in an overwhelmingly warm and welcoming white land. Despite this warmth, the nation has changed palpably: It is meaner and courser, as physically divided as it is politically. The aggression in our culture is obvious in the way people drive, especially in blue states. Out west, no one drives in the passing lane. On the coasts folks drive like a pack of hyenas on meth.
But I shouldn’t joke about meth. As one drives through postindustrial America and shelters in impoverished trailer camps, one can sense the opioids bleeding through the air vents. The impulse to close them is akin to the urge to look away and forget how much coastal wealth and groupthink has caused the economically ravaged wasteland that typifies most parts of this, the richest country on earth.
That land mass, once occupied by Indigenous peoples and unspoiled nature, was redesigned by Thomas Jefferson and his Cartesian platting of a one-square–mile grid to achieve manifest destiny. The urban rejoinders to his homesteading individualism were small towns with main streets scattered among ranches and farms, pesky reminders of our need as a species to gather for both culture and commerce—a desire that continues post-pandemic, Zoom happy hours be damned.
Rural main streets once flourished, often around the local rail depot or riverfront, but by the 1980s they were decimated by shopping malls with national chain stores that wiped out mom and pop shops. By the nineties the malls expanded, replacing downtowns as the places where families gathered, elders gossiped, and teens flirted. In the first decade of the 21st century, big box stores and e-commerce summarily killed the shopping malls, replacing their ersatz communal spaces with today’s seas of barren asphalt lots and glowing basement screens, each devoid of serendipity, touch, or romance. Simultaneously automation and outsourcing eliminated good jobs, leading to the final, vulturous death knell of coastal private equity firms sweeping in and picking the carcass clean, crushing what remained of local pharmacies and bookstores, consolidating them into online monopolies and vacant storefronts.
Given this assault on the hinterland that was exacerbated by two wars and a Great Recession—all during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency—is it shocking to learn that 206 counties that voted twice for the hope and change of Barack Obama opted for Trump’s retrograde nostalgia in 2016? As a dark-skinned man who has experienced more prejudice on the coasts than in between, it is clear to me that Trumpism is about far more than his own blatant racism—it is, for many, about rage against our machine. Not until the bipartisan enactment of Biden-Harris industrial and infrastructure policy, the benefits of which most have yet to feel, did we truly begin to address the economic, cultural, and community abandonment that so many feel.
Prior to this administration, we allowed or ignored, while many profited from, the devolution of our heartland from main streets to malls to meth.
This is why we at PAU, as designers of communities, work in Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, and downtown Niagara Falls instead of Saudi Arabia and China. What we hear consistently from people nationwide is that they need places to hang out and hook up, to see each other eye to eye instead of through the divisive looking glass of social media, and to celebrate the joy of being together in their diversity, even in the most rural of communities. This is why, whether designing a new bridge or a heritage trail or a park system—or, yes, the expansion of the forever-bipartisan Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—we conceive each endeavor as the construction of a community center, as the reapplication of a societal glue that we for generations have let dry and crack to the point where we view each other with derision instead of what is our natural, national wont: to embrace each other only as Americans can regardless of race, religion, gender, or creed. It is to this welcoming America that my parents emigrated to when they settled in Arizona in 1968 with two small children and $32, and it is this America we must not only recall but rebuild.
If elected, I hope President Harris can extend the Biden legacy to include community-based affordable housing as she has announced, vocational education, local cultural and heritage institutions, mass transit, broadband internet access, and public space investments across small towns and big cities in an effort to build what I have for years advocated as an Infrastructure of Opportunity. To succeed, these cannot be disconnected policy widgets delivered through scatter-shot appropriations; instead, these investments should yield integrated places of belonging, centers that reknit our national fabric and retain younger generations in small towns like Springfield, Ohio, with fresh economic and social opportunities. After World War II, through white-flight suburbanization, redlining, highway construction, and urban renewal—and, now, with social media—we have designed a disconnected, distrustful, disinterested culture. Seen more optimistically, this means we can also design something different and better, not as a top-down “globalist” imposition, but as a grassroots means to deliver new local choices for those with few today.
This land was our land, and it could be again. As politicians, lawyers, economists, and academics fight about our future, I look across our vast, gorgeous, kaleidoscopic nation and see what all our arguments miss: We can’t fight our way out of division. We must design our way towards unity.
Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect and founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and author of the book, The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy, out now.
