Conrad Hamann’s discussion of divided and fragmented cities describes stressed and dystopic places- urban environments that have become irreconcilable through ideologies, difference of religion, or of ethnicity. That discussion is highly charged with terms like ghetto, apartheid or redlining. It is an urban image drawn with walls and barbed wire fences but also with invisible virtual or administrative borders.
Names like Berlin, Belfast, Soweto, Harlem, Jim Crow or Gaza all invoke powerful images of conflict and separation in cities. This is contrasted with cities separated from their outside and by protective walls- or twin cities united (Budapest or Minneapolis St Paul) and the tendency of a metropolis to absorb and join up villages ( London and Tokyo as great examples). We need to remember too that our conversation is happening on a city grid built on the unceded ground of a displaced population. Australian cities had formal apartheid systems (for example Perth’s CBD aboriginal exclusion zone until 1954 and ‘Boundary Streets’ that separated Indigenous Australians from non-Indigenous Australians).
Hamann talks too about both vertical and horizontal urban divisions- the stratification in the section of a tower (a literal underclass through height separation) but also the horizontal fragmentation that can be induced by urban infrastructure like freeways. What is often remarkable is the ability of a city’s people to ignore- (or to be consciously blind) to an extreme division. The borders are often invisible.
