Architecture is always a political act.

There is no such thing as a neutral space.
Every building, every neighborhood, every infrastructure takes a stance — even when it pretends not to.

Architecture doesn’t simply organize functions. It sets implicit rules: who can enter, who can linger, who is visible, who is watched, who remains invisible. Normative bodies — mobile, productive, quiet — are welcomed. The others are expelled, or tolerated only as long as they don’t disturb.

It is a material form of social control.

Margins are not a side effect. They are a deliberate product.
Spaces are designed to select.
Access, care, breath — these are not granted to everyone.

In working-class neighborhoods, the air is worse. Homes are poorly insulated, windows are smaller, noise levels higher. Services vanish. Bodies wear out.
This is not inefficiency.
It is political planning.
A politics of disinvestment, neglect, and spatial selection.

On the other end, there are gated communities, privatized districts, corporate campuses designed to erase the outside. Every barrier, every checkpoint, every private garden is a declaration of power.

Even beauty is a form of exclusion.
Who decides what’s worth preserving? Who defines taste? Who gets memorialized in plaques and renovations?
Heritage is not neutral. It’s a narrative. And every narrative has its ghosts.

Architecture, like the urban landscape, reveals ideological alliances.
Fascist monumentalism and green gentrification share a logic: to build order, erase conflict, and normalize what disturbs.

Benches with armrests, narrow sidewalks, the lack of public toilets — these are not minor details. They are spatial devices of class, ableism, and marginalization.
This is the architecture of discipline, of decency, of privilege that refuses to be disturbed.

Even “not taking a stance” is a political choice.
Designers who ignore the spatial implications of inequality are actively reproducing them.

We need a radical shift in perspective.
An architecture that begins at the margins, that reads pain as knowledge, that recognizes the right to opacity, to complexity, to fragility.
An architecture that doesn’t just build, but knows when to refuse.
Because not everything that can be designed should be built.
And not everything that exists is worth preserving.