Preface: This article was co-created with ChatGPT.

After World War II, Minneapolis entered a phase that appeared progressive on the surface but was, in practice, internally self-consuming. Urban renewal and highway construction were framed as projects of modernization, justified through the language of efficiency, sanitation, mobility, and growth. Yet the logic guiding their implementation largely reproduced an older order of selection: who could be sacrificed, and who had to be protected.

In postwar American cities, highways were never merely transportation infrastructure. They functioned as instruments of state-led spatial reordering. In the Twin Cities region, the routing of corridors such as I-94 and I-35W was not simply the result of technical optimization, but more closely resembled a search for minimal political resistance. Road construction entailed displacement, noise, pollution, land devaluation, and community destruction. Any route would produce losers. The decisive filter was which communities had the capacity to organize opposition, delay approvals, and impose political costs—and which did not.

The areas selected for disruption tended to share structural characteristics. First, land values had been systematically depressed. Redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and long-term withdrawal of public and private investment made these neighborhoods appear “cheap” in fiscal assessments. Second, residents possessed limited political resources. High proportions of renters, racial marginalization, and weak ties to municipal elites meant that even when opposition emerged, it was difficult to sustain effective pressure. Third, these neighborhoods had already been problematized in official discourse. They were more easily described as “blighted,” “in need of renewal,” or “already damaged,” allowing further destruction to be rationalized as inevitable.

At the Twin Cities scale, the most widely cited example is St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood—a mature Black residential and commercial district that was directly cut through by the construction of I-94 in the 1950s and 1960s. The highway did not pass through empty land; it dismantled a functioning social system. Conditions on the Minneapolis side were not identical, but the underlying logic was similar. In North Minneapolis, neighborhoods such as Near North were likewise fragmented by highway corridors and interchanges, forcibly severing what had once been continuous living spaces.

Streets are not abstract lines; they are conduits of daily life. Churches, grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants, repair shops, and community organizations had once been connected within walkable distance. When a highway was imposed, these connections did not gradually erode—they failed abruptly.

Crucially, urban planning at the time did not treat “social networks” as assets requiring compensation. What was counted were housing units, land values, and traffic efficiency. Internal systems of mutual aid, employment access, caregiving, and information circulation were excluded from cost calculations. When these networks collapsed, the consequences were often relabeled as “population problems,” “crime problems,” or “concentrated poverty,” rather than acknowledged as structural damage caused by planning decisions. Spatial violence was translated into social deficiency.

This selective routing also produced long-term physical isolation. Highways were not one-time displacement events; they became enduring boundaries. Noise, ramps, overpasses, and constant traffic sharply reduced cross-neighborhood movement. Living radii that might otherwise have extended organically toward the city core were compressed onto one side of the highway. The relationship between North Minneapolis and the city center shifted from proximity to separation.

Highways sent a clear signal to the communities they cut through: this land was meant to be passed over, not protected. It told residents that this was not a place the city would go out of its way to preserve, but a place it was willing to trade for efficiency. Over subsequent decades, this signal shaped investment decisions, public service allocation, and residents’ expectations of their own futures.

Small businesses, auto shops, restaurants, churches, and community organizations had once provided employment, mutual support, and channels of information. When these were erased by infrastructure projects, the city did not offer equivalent replacements. Instead, the outcomes were reframed as “social problems.” Responsibility shifted accordingly. The city gained faster commutes and smoother capital flows, while the social costs were permanently embedded in the same communities.

At the same time, the economic foundations of the industrial era were undergoing structural change. Traditional manufacturing sectors—flour milling among them—had already begun to decline after World War I, and by the mid-twentieth century this trend was reinforced through automation, consolidation, and industrial restructuring. More broadly, manufacturing jobs steadily disappeared from or relocated out of the urban core, eliminating large numbers of positions that had once relied on mid-level skills, physical labor, and discipline.

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, such jobs had provided a crucial upward pathway. They did not require higher education, yet they offered stable income, family support, and the possibility of long-term community rootedness. For immigrant workers and, later, Black Americans entering the city, these industries represented some of the few viable routes to economic security. In the postwar period, however, this pathway was systematically weakened.

For white middle-class residents, these changes coincided with the opening of alternative routes. Suburbanization offered new residential options; federal housing finance and highway systems lowered the cost of relocation; higher education expanded rapidly, with the GI Bill and public universities enabling career transitions; service, managerial, and professional jobs grew in emerging economic sectors. For them, the disappearance of old jobs did not necessarily mean the disappearance of opportunity.

For residents of North Minneapolis, by contrast, these routes were structurally constrained. Housing finance systems and racial segregation limited access to suburban mobility. Educational expansion did not eliminate school inequality or economic barriers. Recruitment networks in emerging industries were largely disconnected from their neighborhoods, schools, and social ties. When traditional jobs disappeared, there was no clear “next stop.” Unemployment ceased to be cyclical waiting and became a condition of prolonged disconnection.

This rupture was self-reinforcing. Long-term unemployment undermined household wealth accumulation, narrowed children’s educational trajectories, and weakened communities’ political and economic bargaining power. By the time the next generation entered the labor market, they no longer faced a city in transition, but a structure that had already excluded them from core opportunities. Informal economies, low-wage service work, and unstable employment became dominant options, reinforcing the label of “problem neighborhoods.”

From the perspective of urban governance, this period produced a dangerous misalignment. Economic development policy succeeded in attracting capital, firms, and high-skilled talent, but social policy failed to build bridges from the old economy to the new one. A city could be considered a success in terms of GDP, sectoral composition, and aggregate employment while simultaneously generating long-term unemployment and exclusion along spatial and racial lines.

Within this structural context, the role of policing was increasingly pushed to the foreground. When employment, education, and public investment failed to absorb risk, problems once addressed by social services or public health were compressed into the category of “public order.” In North Minneapolis, law enforcement became the most stable and visible presence of government, while housing repair, school improvement, and job programs remained insufficient. This imbalance placed responsibilities on police that they were never meant to carry, while making them the most visible outlet for structural failure.

These accumulated tensions approached a critical threshold in the 2010s. Police killings were not new, but institutional responses remained confined to investigations, training, and procedural fixes. The structure itself was never rewritten—only repeatedly explained. When George Floyd was killed in public in 2020, the video rendered visible what had long been embedded in the system. The rapid escalation of protest was not the result of emotional volatility, but of a long-contained reality losing its capacity to be absorbed.