David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities

Race, space and power in cities are the subject of the work of David Theo Goldberg, a South African-born philosopher based in the United States and for two decades director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. His thesis is that racism is not only prejudice or discourse but a way of organising space: the modern city has been built by assigning different places to racialised populations, and that assignment, ghettos, peripheries, zones of exclusion, produces and reproduces race as a category. Goldberg formulated it in Racist Culture (1993), developed it in The Racial State (2002) and updated it in The Threat of Race (2009), where he analyses how neoliberalism claims to have overcome race while keeping its geographies.

Periphractic space: the confinement that manufactures race

His starting point is periphractic space, a concept he introduced in a 1993 essay on racist discourse and urban location. The modern city, he argues, has managed populations deemed dangerous or inferior through spatial confinement: the European Jewish ghetto, the Indigenous reservation, the South African township, the American Black ghetto and, in the contemporary city, the public housing periphery or the informal settlement. Those spaces are not the consequence of race but its factory: by separating people by place, the city turns an invented difference into a visible reality, with its borders, its police and its statistics.

The Racial State: zoning, censuses and citizenship

The Racial State widens the argument to the state. Goldberg shows that modern states were built as racial states, which defined who belonged to the nation through citizenship laws, censuses, immigration and housing, and that cities were their most effective instrument: zoning, infrastructure planning and the distribution of services materialised the racial hierarchy without needing to name it. He distinguishes two traditions, the naturalist, which attributes inferiority to biology, and the historicist, which attributes it to backwardness and promises an ever-postponed integration, and argues that the second governs the liberal city.

Racial neoliberalism: race without laws

The Threat of Race analyses the current phase, which Goldberg calls racial neoliberalism. Official discourse declares race overcome, bans explicit discrimination and celebrates diversity, while the privatisation of services, the retreat of the state and market logic maintain and deepen segregation: racialised neighbourhoods lose public schools and hospitals, housing is allocated by ability to pay and police and prisons become the only state presence. Race no longer needs laws because the market and space reproduce it on their own, and whoever names it is accused of perpetuating it.

From South Africa to Europe: cases and demands for planning

Goldberg has applied that framework to concrete cases: South Africa after apartheid, where racial geography survived democracy; the United States, with mortgage redlining and concentrated public housing; Europe, with migrant peripheries treated as security threats; and Israel and Palestine, with walls and roads separating populations. His work converses with the critical geography of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and with Douglas Massey's urban studies of segregation, but his specific contribution is philosophical: showing that race is a spatial technology of government.

For planning, Goldberg leaves a demand: read every decision on zoning, infrastructure, surveillance and services by its racial effect, even when it does not mention race, and recognise that neutral policies applied to unequal geographies reproduce inequality. Dismantling racial space requires investment in confined neighbourhoods, housing dispersed across the whole city, democratic control of the police and a memory that acknowledges how the borders were drawn. The just city, in his reading, is one that no longer needs race to know who lives where.