V. Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture. Her book, “Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction” was published in March 2026 by Columbia University Press.
How did you get the idea for this project?
I have written a book about erasure because my work as a designer needed this book. My ethos and techniques required more framing than what I could do as a designer. I learned this especially in Detroit, the Bronx, and New Orleans – places where I designed projects, gathered people, and collaborated – where I repeatedly encountered deep distrust of architects.
How did the project develop or change throughout the research and writing process?
My book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, “urban renewal”—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction. I did not know how the book would come together until it was almost finished.
What questions for future investigation has the project sparked?
The book draws together archival research, personal narrative, and design theory, linking the aesthetics of “good” and “bad” design to protocols of demolition, slum clearance, and erasure. Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day. Facing this in the future requires collaboration between architects and collective change makers who would usually avoid architects—local historians, activists, long-term building occupants, healers.
Why should people read this book?
The book inquires into ways that the design of erasure has formed the space around us. About my book, theorist Jack Halbserstam, David Feinson Professor of the Humanities Columbia University, says: “This book will become essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the links between slum clearance and fascist investments in racial purity.”
Read a review of “Erasure by Design” in The Architect’s Newspaper, written by Janet Vertesi (Sociology). Learn more about other publications by Princeton University faculty in the humanities by exploring our Faculty Bookshelf.
