Or it's the highway that cut the neighborhood in half in 1965, the one that justified bulldozing people's homes by pointing out they weren't entitled to them, and left a wall of concrete through a community that is still, sixty years later, divided by it. Or the factory that moved its operations across the border and left behind a generation of workers who are now fifty-five and too old to retrain and too young to retire. Or the app that knows everything about you — who you talk to, where you go, what you want — and gives you nothing for it — except access to people who you can now, conveniently, only reach through the app.
They are connected. This book is about how.
Under your feet, eight feet down, is someone's kitchen floor.
Atlantic City was a working-class neighborhood of about 400 families located just west of downtown, bordered by Colley Avenue and the Elizabeth River, around what is now the midtown tunnel entrance and under what is now a medical campus. In the early 1950s it was one of the few places in Norfolk where the color line was blurring — Black families displaced by an earlier round of urban renewal had found rental housing there, and by the mid-1950s Atlantic City had become one of the only predominantly white neighborhoods in the city where the African American population exceeded ten percent. It was a functioning working-class community: nearly a quarter of its homes were single-family freestanding houses, close to twenty percent built in the last thirty years.
In 1957, the city council approved demolition. Hundreds of homes were torn down to build Norfolk General Hospital — now a medical campus — and expand the surrounding road infrastructure. No new housing was built for those displaced. The community was not relocated. It was erased.
Atlantic City was not an isolated case. Between 1951 and the formal end of urban renewal in 1973, every racially integrated neighborhood in Norfolk was targeted for clearance. Roughly 20,000 people — almost a tenth of the city's population — were displaced. James Baldwin called it what it was: Negro removal.
Why these neighborhoods specifically? White's analysis is precise: the targeting aimed to wipe out the city's transition neighborhoods where indistinct color lines had failed to produce two distinct school communities, one Black and one white. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 had made explicit school segregation unconstitutional. The city's response was to destroy the integrated neighborhoods that would have produced integrated schools — to maintain de facto segregation by eliminating the residential conditions that made integration possible. When that wasn't sufficient, Norfolk simply locked six of its public schools in 1958, leaving more than ten thousand students with nowhere to go.
The hospital that was built on Atlantic City now trains the doctors who serve the region. It has produced significant medical research. It has received significant public investment and genuine community pride. The land simply became institutional, and the institution proceeded, and this is understood as progress.
This is enclosure in its full form. Not just the taking — the forgetting. The conversion is complete when the commons that was destroyed becomes invisible as a commons, when what replaced it is understood as having grown on empty ground.
The Atlantic City neighborhood was demolished in 1957. The campus that replaced it is still there. In 2021, in the midst of a federal Fair Housing lawsuit, the city was simultaneously demolishing Tidewater Gardens — different community, same machine — and promising that this time, things would be different.
Norfolk holds neighborhood association meetings. I went to several. The neighborhood I'd bought into — Chelsea — is complicated in a way that matters. Walk through it at three in the afternoon and it is overwhelmingly Black. The MHI shipyard workers coming off shift, the people at the 7-Eleven, the bodies moving through the streets. But look at property ownership, residency, voter registration — it's a different picture. The people whose presence constitutes Chelsea's daily life don't live there. They live scattered across the suburbs, where the affordable housing is. And there is no bus stop in Chelsea. Not one. No public transit at all. The dispersion is not incidental. A workforce that cannot anchor itself to a neighborhood cannot constitute a constituency in that neighborhood. The people who are there every day, whose labor built the place, whose presence makes it what it is — they have no neighborhood meeting to show up to. They are extracted from the place without being of it.
So the people at the neighborhood association meetings were overwhelmingly white. And what I saw on their faces when they talked about the neighborhood — their neighborhood, the one they lived in — was fear. Not of anything specific. Of the fact of it. Of the demographics they could see but not account for, the history they sensed without knowing, the 7-Eleven that outperformed every small business in a two-block radius because the workers coming off shift knew better than to come into a wine bar. Fear of the thing they were, technically, a part of.
Then I'd see the same people at the dive bar across the street on a Friday night, laughing, relaxed, fine.
The Atlantic slave trade removed an estimated twelve million people from Africa over roughly four centuries. The world those people came from — the cities and trade networks and governance structures, the craft knowledge fitted into walls without mortar, the political administrations governing millions — went with them. The demographic cost was larger than the number suggests: for every person transported, others died in raids, in coastal holding pens, in the crossing. In the regions most intensively exploited, population growth reversed for generations. The economic impact compounded the demographic — the trade restructured African political economies around slave-raiding rather than production, destroyed the social cooperation that sustained development, created dependencies on European trade goods that made African producers import-dependent. The trade didn't just remove people. It reorganized the continent around European demand.
Then formal colonization. By 1900, European powers controlled almost the entire continent. One detail stands for the structure: railways built to connect mines and plantations to ports, not to connect African cities to each other. Infrastructure oriented entirely outward — linking Africa to Europe rather than Africa to itself. The colonies were not economies. They were logistics networks for someone else's economy. Inscription on the continent itself — the spell written in steel.
When the flag came down, the question stayed: what would replace the extraction architecture, or be allowed to.
Some answers were tried. In Tanzania, the ujamaa program organized agricultural production around the extended-family village — collective land, shared work, locally accountable governance. The structural adjustment Rodney was tracing put the conditions on the financing. The villages broke apart. The pattern recurs: African food sovereignty movements, smallholder cooperatives, pastoralist commons in the Sahel — all built around shared use of land, water, herds — squeezed by debt conditions written in Washington, by land deals financed elsewhere, by the structure he was naming. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa now operates across the continent, defending seed commons against patented monoculture and the trade frameworks designed to require it.
The pattern is the one Federici read into the demolished commons of European peasants. Prefiguration under siege, at every scale. Every commons rebuilt has to be defended against the same engineered emptying.
The abandoned neighborhood: in 1968, the Kerner Commission warned that American cities were moving toward "two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal" and called for massive investment in urban infrastructure, housing, and public services. The response was the systematic defunding of exactly what the commission identified. Fifty years later, the neighborhoods the commission described still exist: hospitals closed, schools underfunded, environmental hazards concentrated, emergency services slow to arrive. Not through announced policy but through the accumulated weight of decisions made elsewhere about whose lives warranted investment. The colonial logic persists in the form of which deaths are acceptable in the budget.
Norfolk holds the port, most of the major shipyards, and a concentration of military bases. The bases don't pay property tax. The people living here mostly aren't choosing to be here — they're on temporary assignment, or they were born here and haven't figured out how to leave. The people actively choosing Norfolk are choosing it for family, mostly, with a small proportion of people who see something in the place worth building toward. When we moved here we saw the possibility: a mid-size city with bones, with a waterfront, with the kind of rent that could still support a bohemian life if you arrived before the developers. We wanted to build something — an art colony, a cultural node, the thing that cities like this can become if someone decides to.
What we left behind is harder to measure. A good story. Scattered seeds. Many of our regulars left Norfolk — the city has a way of not holding the people who are choosing to be there. Some of them came back years later and said they couldn't find anything like what we'd built, not in Seattle, not in DC. As far as I know, none of them started their own.
Murray Bookchin grew up in the Bronx in a neighborhood that was itself a kind of argument.
The Bronx of the 1920s and 1930s was dense, multilingual, poor, and alive — built around the specific mutual aid infrastructure that immigrant communities construct wherever they land: the landsmanshaftn, the fraternal societies, the credit unions, the cooperative apartment buildings, the political clubs where people argued in Yiddish and Italian and Spanish about how the world should be organized. The neighborhood had its own ecology, its own commons, its own way of distributing care and resources that didn't route through either the market or the state. You could, if you knew where to go, eat for days on the informal economy of neighbors who owed each other.
Robert Moses would spend thirty years destroying it.
The expressways that cut through the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s — the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced sixty thousand people — were the automobile version of enclosure. The communities that had built an organic commons in the interstices of the city were sacrificed to the car's passage. The ecological commons of the neighborhood was cleared for the machine. Robert Moses and the planners who built Hampton Boulevard over Atlantic City were running the same calculation: the community is the cost, the infrastructure is the product, and the people who paid the cost don't appear in the accounting.
Jane Jacobs was watching the same destruction from Greenwich Village and drawing the same conclusion from the other direction: the city that works is not the city the planner designs but the city that emerges from the mixed uses, the overlapping rhythms, the eyes on the street, the density of informal relationship that Moses's expressways and towers-in-the-park destroyed everywhere they landed. Her argument and Bookchin's are the same argument made from different vantage points — she from the street, he from the theory. The neighborhood is a commons. The planner's intervention is an enclosure.
Bookchin synthesized what he was seeing into a theory he called Social Ecology: the domination of nature and the domination of human beings by each other are not separate problems. They have the same root — hierarchy, the structure that treats the world as a resource to be managed from above rather than a commons to be governed from within. You cannot solve the ecological crisis without dismantling hierarchy. You cannot build genuine democracy without reintegrating humans into the ecological systems they have separated themselves from.
When the dam project displaced these communities, it didn't just move people. It destroyed governance systems that had no way to be relocated. The knowledge was specific to the place — specific to the way this forest responded to this community's use across these generations. The forest the relocating community arrives at is a different forest, and the relationship that made the governance work has to be built from scratch, if it can be built at all.
The second wreckage was urban planning in the American South. Norfolk. Hampton Boulevard. I have stood on that street and felt the kitchen floors of the houses they took eight feet under my soles. The wreckage is not metaphor; it is geological. But there is also a corner store that was not on any plan, and a neighborhood association meeting in a church basement that has refused for sixty years to disappear, and a community garden in the right-of-way where the road was supposed to widen and didn't. The collector finds the corner store. The collector finds the church basement. The collector finds the garden.
Atlantic City was a neighborhood before it was a highway.
The book started there — the crossing at Hampton and Brambleton, built on top of a community demolished to build it. The working-class neighborhood, racially integrated in a city that worked hard to prevent that, demolished in 1957 to build Norfolk General Hospital and the roads serving it. The community that was not relocated. The community that was erased.
Underneath the houses and the neighborhood and the social fabric: specific parcels in a specific city, held by the people who lived on them, organized by use and relationship and history. When the city took that land — through eminent domain, through the manufactured slum designation, through the simple fact that the people living there lacked the political power to resist — it took the foundation.
Walk the corridors around what is now the Eastern Virginia Medical School campus today. The neighborhood adjacent to the hospital — Ghent, the historic district along the Elizabeth River — is one of the most expensive zip codes in Hampton Roads. Art galleries. Wine bars. Renovated craftsman houses selling for $600,000. The value of this neighborhood was created, in significant part, by the institutional investment that displaced the community that had been there: the hospital, the medical school, the road infrastructure, the decades of public subsidy that built the anchor institutions whose presence made the surrounding land desirable. Atlantic City's residents were displaced to create the conditions that made their neighbors' land worth more. Their displacement is now invisible in the property values of the people who replaced them.
This is the enclosure running in real time.
Marx called the original version primitive accumulation — the foundational violence by which land held in common was separated from the people whose lives were organized around it, converted into private property, and made available for the extraction of value. The frontier this requires never disappears — it just moves. Atlantic City was that frontier in 1957. The Narmada valley was that frontier in 1999. The Weelaunee forest is that frontier now. It was not ancient history when Marx wrote about it. The English enclosures that drove peasants off common lands and into factory towns were living memory. The colonial land seizures dispossessing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, and Asia were ongoing. Marx named it primitive not because it was simple but because it was first: the precondition for everything that followed. You cannot extract rent from people who own the land they live on. You cannot compel wage labor from people who can feed themselves from their commons. Enclosure is not an accident of history. It is a political choice, made repeatedly, maintained by force.
The institutions built on the displaced community are now the anchor institutions whose presence makes the surrounding land expensive. The displacement didn't just destroy a community. It created the conditions that made it impossible for a community like it to exist there again. The people who might have lived in Atlantic City now cannot afford to live in Ghent.
A woman who grew up in the neighborhood that replaced Atlantic City's residents said it plainly in Chapter 2: they're saying it's for us, but really they're just sprinkling us in there to make us feel welcome. She knew the structure before this chapter existed. She was describing the completion of a process she was living inside — the enclosure made visible to the people it enclosed, decades before any analyst named it.
The herd needed governance: the pattern language that allows a composition of singularities to make decisions over time without dissolving into tyranny or paralysis. Occupy had the field. It did not yet have the form. It was not destroyed from within. It was demolished from outside, by coordinated municipal action across cities — the same pattern Federici documented in the fifteenth century, the same pattern Roy documented in the Narmada valley. External power doesn't compete with commons governance. It destroys the conditions that make commons governance possible.