Fascism on the Rise Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show · Burt Cohen

Architecture as the Ultimate Expression of Power: Gaza 2035

·59 min·3 clips

Burt Cohen starts with Project 2025 and asks whether there is a Netanyahu Project 2035 for Gaza. That slogan opens into a broader question about who gets to define progress, and Cohen brings in his memory of Boston's West End to show how a neighborhood can be cleared out while the people who lived there are told the change is for their own good. That sets the moral frame. The conversation keeps circling back to displacement, war, and the habit of making power sound like improvement. Wagner joins that frame rather than softening it. She says the Gaza renderings are still at a very early, almost vending-machine stage, which matters because the bigger story is not finished architecture but a political imagination that already knows what kind of land use, extraction, and circulation it wants. The imagery gets picked apart line by line. Cohen and Wagner look at the Gaza Sea, the oil drilling rigs, the oil tanker, the beach, the green fields, the deep cut across the landscape, and the freight trains bridging it, then note the clusters of glass towers that echo the familiar future-city aesthetic of decades of media. The result does not feel neutral. It reads like a fantasy of capital and infrastructure, with factories, a sports stadium, solar farms, warehouses, and road-and-rail systems arranged around extraction rather than lived community. The discussion keeps returning to the word development. Cohen links it to urban renewal, to older histories of dominant cultures building over what was there, and to the American story of settlement and indigenous loss, so the Gaza discussion never feels isolated or exceptional. Wagner keeps the focus on power. For her, the architecture is almost secondary to the broader economic aims, because the renderings function less as plans for human life than as a way to imagine control over land, labor, and resources. The tone stays grave and plainspoken. Cohen lets the guest carry the analysis, but he keeps nudging the conversation toward the civic question underneath it: what language can still describe this honestly? The episode closes by treating genocide or war crime as terms that do not need special nuance, then folds into the usual invitation to subscribe and share.

As heard by us

A sharp look at how redevelopment talk can hide displacement, extraction, and the language of progress.

The episode treats architecture as a ledger of power: who gets displaced, who profits, and who gets to call destruction progress. Burt Cohen and Kate Wagner move from Boston's West End to Gaza through urban renewal and development language, and the point is plain enough:…

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If you want the politics hiding inside a futuristic redevelopment pitch, start here.

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