Cultural Fatigue and the Standardized City
How American friend/enemy thinking shaped urban planning worldwide—and why we're exhausted
Reading Sasha Mudd's piece in Prospect about political violence in America gave me language for something I'd been unable to name. She describes how American politics now operates on friend/enemy logic—you're either with us or you're vermin, scum, enemies of the people. As I read her analysis, I suddenly understood why I feel so exhausted navigating modern cities.
As a Canadian-born with Maltese and Trinidadian heritage, I have ancestral memory from three different relationships to power and place. This triple lens makes certain patterns impossible to ignore. The fatigue I feel in city environments goes beyond traffic or daily travel. It's a profound awareness that imperialism takes on new forms, feeling drained from seeing American exceptionalism impose itself on cities, similar to how empires historically colonized nations.
Democrats and Republicans alike once condemned political violence. But in Maga world, all opponents are "scum" and everything is fodder for the culture war.
This transformation—from accepting disagreement to demanding elimination—reveals how Americans now approach everything, including cities. There's only one right way to live: their way. Everything else is backward, inefficient, and wrong. My Trinidadian heritage makes me recognize this voice immediately. It's the voice of empire, just speaking through traffic engineers instead of colonial governors.
The Architecture of Domination
Mudd traces this thinking to Carl Schmitt, the Nazi theorist who argued that politics requires clear friend/enemy distinctions:
Schmitt argued that politics depends on a sharp friend/enemy distinction—demonising the "enemy within" is essential for legitimacy and social cohesion. He claimed that liberal states weaken themselves by blurring this boundary, extending rights to those who do not truly belong.
American urban planning operates on identical logic. Cars are friends, pedestrians are enemies. Suburbs represent success, and density signals failure. Single-family homes are good, and apartments are bad. But here's what my background helps me see: this isn't just bad planning. It's cultural imperialism enforced through infrastructure.
Growing up hearing stories from Trinidad and Malta, I learned that power shapes places to reflect itself. The British not only governed but also redesigned ports, implemented street grids, and dismissed local patterns as inferior. Americans do the same thing, just with parking requirements instead of parliamentary systems. They've convinced the world that their way of organizing space is the only modern way, and everything else needs development.
The language reveals the colonial mindset. Traditional neighbourhoods are blighted—a word that sounds like disease, requiring a cure. Walking is inefficient—judgment disguised as measurement. Mixed-use streets are chaotic because order means separation, American-style. Just as Trump calls opponents vermin, planning documents mark different ways of life as infections requiring elimination.
The Triple Exhaustion
My exhaustion navigating these spaces stems from recognizing imperialism in three different registers. My Maltese background helps me understand high-context cultures, where shared understanding conveys meaning, and the same piazza serves as a market, playground, and social hub through implicit negotiation. From my Trinidadian roots, I recognize how external powers often dismiss local knowledge as outdated while enforcing their superior systems. From my Canadian perspective, I experience the confusion of a country that can't decide whether to resist or embrace American influence.
Edward T. Hall captured part of this when he distinguished cultural communication styles:
High context transactions feature preprogrammed information that is in the receiver and in the setting, with only minimal information in the transmitted message. Low context transactions are the reverse. Most of the information must be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context.
But it goes deeper than communication. American planning represents extremely low-context design wedded to imperial certainty. Every use must be separated because mixing is messy. Every trip requires a car because walking is primitive. Every interaction needs signs and signals because shared understanding is unreliable. It is designed to replace other methods.
The power dynamics compound the exhaustion. Geert Hofstede observed how cultures handle authority differently:
In small power distance countries, there is limited dependence of subordinates on bosses, and there is a preference for consultation... In large power distance countries, there is considerable dependence of subordinates on bosses.
American culture performs low power distance—everyone's equal! everyone chooses!—while hiding its imperialism behind technical language. You're free to live however you want, as long as you follow American spatial rules. The zoning regulation banning corner shops is about "protecting property values." The highway that destroys your neighbourhood is "serving traffic demand."
This particularly galls someone with Caribbean heritage. We know what cultural imperialism looks like when it pretends to be neutral progress. When consultants trained in Phoenix redesign tropical cities for air conditioning and cars, when walkable neighbourhoods get bulldozed for modern neighbourhoods, when local knowledge gets dismissed as informal, we've seen this before. The methods may differ, but the core message stays the same. Your lifestyle is flawed, ours is correct, and we're here to assist you in developing.
Manufacturing Consent Through Concrete
Hall identified another aspect of American culture that explains how this imperialism operates:
Americans compartmentalize their lives more than most peoples... We schedule one thing at a time and concentrate on it, whereas in polychronic cultures, many things are dealt with at once.
This compartmentalization is weaponized through planning. When zoning separates every use, it destroys the polychronic street life that Mediterranean and Caribbean cultures create naturally. When parking requirements assume everyone drives alone, they make communal transportation impossible. The infrastructure enforces American values.
Now, social media amplifies this monoculture. Young planners worldwide learn from American YouTube channels, absorbing frameworks created for American problems. They debate American solutions to non-American contexts. A planning student in Port of Spain or Valletta might know more about San Francisco's housing crisis than their own city's history.
The result is exhausting because it's totalizing. Whether in Toronto, Malta, or Trinidad, we navigate spaces designed for American individualism. As Hofstede noted:
In individualist societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individual rights. People are expected to stand up for themselves and their immediate family, and to choose their own affiliations.
But what if your culture values extended family? What if your identity comes through community rather than individual achievement? Too bad. The suburb assumes nuclear families. The transportation system assumes individual cars. The zoning assumes separate uses. Conform or suffer.
Living in an Occupied Territory
French anthropologist Marc Augé gave a name to what this creates:
The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude... If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.
Every mall, every highway, every parking lot represents American culture's victory over local ways of life. These non-places multiply across the globe, identical whether in Calgary or Cairo, because they're designed to erase difference rather than accommodate it.
The statistics reveal how colonization has shaped urban planning. Toronto, though diverse, compels two-thirds of its residents to rely on cars and live in suburban areas. Malta, an island ideal for walking, now holds Europe's highest rate of car ownership. In Trinidad, traditional neighbourhoods are demolished to make way for malls. These are not accidental results but deliberate forms of conquest.
My fatigue stems from noticing these patterns everywhere. The same urge that led powerful nations to impose European street designs on African cities now drives American planners to promote suburban expansion in Caribbean islands. The same belief that once deemed indigenous governance primitive now considers walking backwards to be a backward step. The same extractive mindset that transformed colonies into resource sources now converts cities into car storage areas.
We're exhausted from translating. It isn't just between languages or contexts. We also struggle with different worldviews. We navigate spaces that hold values we don't agree with, support divisions we oppose, and demand acts of individualism that drain our collective energy.
The False Choice of Planning
What makes this particularly insidious is how it's framed as progress. Just as colonialists claimed to bring civilization, American planners claim to bring economic development. You can have a modern city or a backward one. You can have parking or poverty. You can have highways or stagnation. The friend/enemy logic Mudd identifies operates through false choices that hide power behind technical language.
But I know from my heritage that these are lies. Malta's ancient cities worked perfectly before modernization. Trinidad's communities thrived before urbanization. The exhaustion many of us feel comes from being forced to live in spaces that solve problems we didn't have, using methods that create new ones, all while being told we should be grateful for the progress.
The power operates through shame as much as force. Traditional markets get labelled informal, as if centuries of evolution count for nothing against American strip malls. Walking neighbourhoods get called underdeveloped, as if human-scale life is just a phase before cars arrive. Mixed-use streets get termed chaotic, as if separation is the natural order rather than a recent invention.
Breaking the Imperial City
Mudd offers hope through political theorist Chantal Mouffe:
She agrees with him that politics is fundamentally conflictual, inevitably involving "us" versus "them" dynamics, but insists that political opponents be treated as "adversaries". This means recognising the legitimacy of those with whom we profoundly disagree, and contesting their views through public debate rather than violence.
Cities need this same recognition—that different approaches represent legitimate choices, not stages of development with American sprawl as the inevitable endpoint. Some cultures thrive with individual houses and private cars. Others flourish with communal spaces and shared transportation. Neither is superior; both deserve infrastructure that supports their values.
But achieving this requires what my background has taught me: recognizing imperialism when you see it. When planning documents use neutral language to impose specific cultural values, that's imperialism. When international development funds require American-style infrastructure, that's imperialism. When local knowledge gets dismissed as backward, that's imperialism. The exhaustion so many feel is our bodies recognizing what our minds are trained to overlook.
Mudd concludes:
The Minnesota assassinations remind us that democracy's greatest vulnerability lies not in laws or institutions but in our collective imagination—in how we frame political struggle and view fellow citizens.
Similarly, our cities' vulnerability lies in the imagination captured by American certainty. When we can only envision one path to modernity, when technical language hides cultural domination, and when different ways of life are framed as problems requiring solutions, we've already lost. The American model, in its exceptional arrogance, has forgotten that humans create meaning differently across cultures.
My exhaustion is shared by many people around the world who are working within imposed environments. It highlights the disconnect between human needs and the infrastructure built to meet them, as well as between shared cultural values and individual spaces. It also reflects the lingering effects of imperial ambitions, which often outlast the empires themselves. We are essentially living in the remnants of American imperialism, and our bodies are aware of this reality even when our minds are persuaded by ideas of progress.
That exhaustion isn't weakness. It's recognition. It's our culture insisting through our bodies that something doesn't fit. We're tired of translating ourselves into American spatial language, tired of performing individualism we don't feel, tired of navigating cities designed to erase who we are.
Recognizing this, with all the historical weight my heritage carries, could spark something new. I think of places that nurture different ways of life. These places maintain productive tension. Cities, like democracies, are judged by how they manage differences. Right now, American friend/enemy logic dominates and admits no alternatives. As a result, cities are failing us.
The first step is to identify what exhausts us. The deeper violence of being compelled to live in spaces that deny our ways of being human. Only then can we envision cities that allow us to be who we truly are.
Editor’s note: As I write this, yesterday's Club World Cup final offered two perfect examples of American culture inserting itself where it doesn't belong. Michael Buffer's "Let's get ready to rumble!" opened the match. Then, Donald Trump refused to leave the stage during Chelsea's trophy celebration, forcing FIFA President Infantino to physically try to guide him away while 81,000 fans booed.
Even our global celebrations now require American packaging and American protagonists. The exhaustion never ends.