The list continues:

• Jane Jacobs on railroad tracks:

Railroad tracks are the classic example of borders, so much so that they came to stand, long ago, for social borders too—“the other side of the tracks”—a connotation, incidentally, associated with small towns rather than with big cities. Here we shall be concerned not with the social connotations of areas demarcated by borders, but rather with the physical and functional effects of borders on their immediate city surroundings. “The curse of border vacuums,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p257, emphasis added)

• Kevin Lynch, introducing edges in The Image of the City:

These edge elements…are for many people important organizing features, particularly in the role of holding together generalized areas…. (p47)

• I keep coming back to the stories of the protectionism that inspired early zoning legislation and protective covenants. That protectionism grew under the Depression-era formation of the FHA underwriting standards and priorities. Another set of lending practices grew out of the depression-era financing undertaken by the HOLC - proto-redlining, perhaps. Here’s what FDR had to say to Congress:

This policy is that the broad interests of the Nation require that special safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guaranty of social and economic stability, and that to protect home owners from inequitable enforced liquidation, in a time of general distress, is a proper concern of the Government. (emphasis added)

The story of the suburbs picks up pace somewhere in here, before the end of World War II and the construction of the interstate highway system, as the abridged version of the story goes.

• Redlining’s destructive power appears only as an echo, or rather a shadow. The Community Reinvestment Act, recently scapegoated amidst the recent housing crisis, has been in effect my whole lifetime.
• Balkanized. We’ve got a verb referring to the hostile divisions of the Balkans. I think it’s scalable down to the neighborhood level.

Maybe there’s hope in a bit of synthesis I’m reaching for tomorrow.