With the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities, in partnership with the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design, has launched a four-year Urban Humanities Initiative on “The Divided City.” Our goal is to bring humanities scholars into productive interdisciplinary dialogue with architects, urban designers, landscape architects, legal scholars, sociologists, geographers, GIS cartographers, and others around one of the most persistent and vexing issues in urban studies: segregation.

We recognize that the term “segregation” has particular historical meaning in U.S. contexts, but following the frameworks suggested by Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities and Seth Low’s collection, Theorizing the City, we contend that the “divided city” and “segregation” are concepts that can be theorized globally. By “segregation” we mean not only once-legal racial separation in the United States or South Africa, but also persistent and widespread issues related to cities divided along racial, cultural, and economic lines through the spatial divisions found in so many parts of the world. These issues include social isolation and fragmentation, loneliness, environmental risks, and lack of access to basic services such as food, transit, health care, and public education. In short, our aim is to employ “segregation” as a theoretical framework, as we explore the reciprocal relationship between urban forms and social change.

The Divided City Initiative focuses on how segregation in this broad sense has and often continues to play out as a set of spatial practices in cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces, including schools, health facilities, and entertainment venues. Using the St. Louis metropolitan area as one of our research sites, we intend to explore the intersecting social and spatial practices of urban separation locally and globally.