We no longer care about the city that excludes.
Contemporary architecture and urban planning, as they are still taught, narrated, and practiced in mainstream Western contexts, must be openly declared unsustainable. Not only in ecological terms, but also in cultural, social, and political ones. Dominant narratives—firmly rooted in patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial models—have built an idea of the city that no longer responds (if it ever did) to the needs, bodies, and experiences of the majority.
Much of modern and contemporary architectural culture has been based on an implicit subject: male, white, cisgender, able-bodied, productive. It is around this archetype that urban spaces, housing, infrastructure, and the very rhythms of the city have been designed. Everything that falls outside this model—disability, care, migration, economic marginality, queer identity, chronic illness, grief, slowness—has been systematically excluded or pushed to the margins.
Today, however, this paradigm is showing deep cracks. The multiplication of intersecting crises—climatic, social, housing, democratic—makes it increasingly urgent to adopt a critical gaze. Sustainability can no longer mean energy efficiency or vertical greenery. Urban regeneration can no longer be a euphemism for gentrification. Participation can no longer serve as a decorative, democratic add-on to top-down decision-making processes.
Urban planning must be radically rethought. Not as a technical discipline, but as a political grammar.
What we call today intersectional urbanism is not yet a formalized theory. It is a political necessity emerging through practices, struggles, and writings. It is a way of deserting the dominant paradigm and interrogating urban space through the lenses of intersectional feminism, ecological justice, queer geographies, and decolonial practices.
It doesn’t arise from textbooks, but from urgency. It has no canon yet—but many voices.
Scholars and activists such as Leslie Kern, Dolores Hayden, bell hooks, Shiri Pasternak, Indigenous feminist networks, and self-organized communities are helping to outline its contours, even without explicitly naming it.
To speak of intersectional urbanism is to open a new theoretical and political space—one where urban design does not merely “include” marginalized subjectivities but is radically reshaped by their lived experiences, needs, and conflicts.
The city, as we know it, is not neutral. It is structurally unequal. Its spatial devices are also symbolic and political: they define belonging, trace boundaries, establish hierarchies.
In this sense, the gaze must shift: from archistars to the margins, from form to access, from the architectural object to the material conditions of life. We need a situated form of urbanism, rooted in real experiences and needs. An eco-trans-feminist urbanism that centers care, relationship, repair, and interspecies coexistence. An urbanism capable of embracing conflict, deconstructing toxic narratives of efficiency, beauty-as-norm, and progress-as-acceleration.
The urban future can no longer be designed according to the aesthetic and functional codes of the elite that has dominated the scene for decades. The time of salvationist rhetoric, of innovation detached from context, of the supposed neutrality of infrastructure is over. What we need is an active desertion of the dominant model—not sterile rejection, but a deliberate stance.
To say that we no longer care is, in fact, to affirm a desire to start elsewhere—from what has been systematically ignored. From desires, from wounds, from interdependence.
To rethink the city today means rejecting the compromise between efficiency and injustice.
It means redefining what we consider a “project,” who is legitimized to speak about space, and whose voices we choose to hear.
It means accepting that urban planning can become a site of struggle, not just administration.
Above all, it means abandoning the belief that change will come from above.
The new paradigm is already here. We just have to learn how to see it.
