Erasure by design: Racial protocols of displacement, demolition, and extraction

How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations―Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance―that is, “urban renewal”―in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles―dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest―to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

V. Mitch McEwen

Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2026

21 X 14 cm, 368 pages