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.
Atlantic City was capture at full force; most days, it looks like the meeting you just attended.
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.
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.
Atlantic City was a neighborhood before it was a highway.
What was taken, when Atlantic City was taken, was land.
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.