Gravitational Geometries of Exclusion

This book examines the relationships between mobility regimes, spatial dynamics, socio-spatial injustice, and the evolution of capitalism in Italy and the United States. Mobilities constitute a central analytical lens for understanding how urban space is produced, organized, and governed. Mobility infrastructures and unequal capacities to move—or to remain immobilized—play a crucial role in shaping the distribution of opportunities, resources, and vulnerabilities across cities. By analyzing the urban trajectories of Brescia and Newark from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century, the book explores how capitalist development, class struggle, racial formations, socioeconomic and racial segregation, and environmental injustice are materially infrastructured through mobility systems. Moving beyond approaches limited to the material-geographic aspects of transit infrastructures, it foregrounds the spatial and political conflicts that underpin urbanization processes. Finally, by placing two “secondary” cities in Western Europe and the United States into dialogue, the analysis adopts a decolonial perspective to interrogate hierarchies and injustices within the Global North.