Cop cities and covert communes: how architecture shapes urban conflict

In 2021, following protests over the murder of George Floyd, hundreds of acres outside of Atlanta were earmarked for law enforcement agencies to build a new training center. Baptized “Cop City,” the site became a blueprint for a future fueled by unconditional, police-enforced control. But soon, this authoritarian vision gave rise to mass protests that swept the country and transcended physical bounds altogether. From websites and rallies, to theater and community education, protesters established diffuse infrastructure to counter a repressive display of state power.

The result? A landscape of dissent that was both meta and physical, able to produce spaces for opposition at different scales. The protesters’ acts of solidarity and care, amplified by contemporary media, became the true site of contestation, creating drag on Cop City, if not halting construction outright. (The training center opened in April.)

Culturally, many of us are uncomfortable with conflict. But it’s human, and it’s nuanced, so failing to confront it can do more harm than good. Indeed, artist and activist Ai Weiwei believes that conflict is not only destructive but also constructive. As architects and urban practitioners, we must keep both faces of conflict — the destructive and the constructive — in view. The landscapes we design can facilitate — or just as easily fetter — principled, productive conflict within the fabric of a diverse city. 

History shows us how. 

Stealth Socialist infrastructure in Austria; invisibilized refugees in Australia

In the early 1900s, progressive urban planners built Red Vienna, an experimental social housing complex guided by anti-capitalist doctrines that stood in stark contrast to Austria’s state of play at the time. Against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence and a conflicted national context, Vienna stood apart as the “socialist capital of a conservative and anti-socialist state,” writes Eva Blau, professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design, in The Architecture of Red Vienna. 

In stark contrast to the national majority, the Social Democrats who governed the city envisioned their architecture as a model of municipal socialism. Yet, in order to gain approval for their radical agenda, they concealed this ideology behind conventional architectural forms and conservative language. Neither modernist nor avant-garde, their housing instead resembled traditional Central European perimeter blocks: brick-built structures with steep gabled roofs.

The complex, consisting of around 400 buildings, integrated 64,000 housing units — enough for one tenth of the city’s population — with the Social Democrats’ new social and cultural infrastructure. These “communal” additions to the residential scheme included clinics, kindergartens, theaters, and cooperative stores located in the buildings’ courtyards, bringing public spaces to seemingly private property. By blurring these lines between public and private, the buildings, which spanned multiple blocks, disrupted the capitalist logic of the city’s development plan and facilitated productive dissent.

As Red Vienna illustrates, urban landscapes can be designed to help challenge a prevailing ideology. But they can just as easily be shaped to suppress dissent and hide punishment, violence, and deep inequity behind a veneer of harmony. Throughout Australia, for example, refugees and asylum seekers are held in offshore camps, or in onshore facilities that are either located as far as possible from cities or hidden within buildings that have other primary uses, rendering them largely invisible. Over 3,000 people have been sent offshore since 2023, and 936 are detained in immigration detention centers and transit accommodations onshore as of May. Others can be found in hospitals, hotels, aged-care and mental-health facilities, which — despite being identified by the local government as “alternatives” — have acted as detention centers with serious human rights impacts. Erasure does not end conflict; it only allows it to deepen unchecked.

Future-focused friction in Denmark and Mexico

Though it’s often easier to condemn conflict than question why it arose in the first place, we need to fight this impulse to bring about a better future. And we face some fierce headwinds: climate change is accelerating displacement, as sociopolitical forces malign migrant communities as the source of urban struggle. It all amounts to segregation and battened down borders that toxify our cities and contemporary social infrastructure. 

To course correct, we must lean in to — not shy away from — the redesign, in all its conflict-riddled glory. That might mean re-integrating communal spaces, re-negotiating the role of public squares, rejecting zoning to create safe spaces for conflict to be addressed and explored, or revitalizing neighborhood communities and fostering urban coexistence. 

The public park Superkilen, located in a fragmented, multicultural area of Copenhagen, is one forward-looking example of urban design that seeks to address social tensions. Developed by architecture firms Topotek 1 and BIG, and artist collective Superflex, the multi-use square incorporates objects and art from more than 60 countries that reflect the identities of local residents. Instead of suppressing the myriad social behaviors and customs at play in the area, the project celebrates them. 

Meanwhile, Utopian Infrastructure: The Campesino Basketball Court — a 2023 Venice Biennale installation from Mexico City–based architectural studio Aprdelesp and artist Mariana Botey — reimagined the basketball court as flexible city infrastructure for facilitating productive conflict. Smaller than a football field and easier to maintain, the basketball court is a staple of urban environments that the curators illustrated is capable of hosting community discussions, deliberations, and debates, in addition to serving as a sporting facility.

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The urban future lies in conflict, in harnessing the creative potential that comes from an inclusive environment. Collision — when consciously designed for — can reshape the built environment through a new resilient and responsive urbanism.

NOTE:This article has been adapted for the Design Observer community from Rebecca Billi’s essay originally published in review of MONU #37: Conflict-Driven Urbanism