The city as labyrith is a long-standing trope, reaching back to the urban lairs and grottos that marked the industrial metropolises of the late nineteenth century. These urban burrows, with their labyrinthine mysteries, were perceived by progressives to be dens of vice and violence, with alleyways harboring minotaurs devouring the innocent. Writing from a liberationist, anarchist position, James Scott argues for the directly opposite perspective: the labyrinthine natue of the pre-urban renewal city offered a space for resistance from oppression, at least for locals. Legibility, especially when deployed as a guiding force for urban renewal, often leads to the “segregation of the population by class and function.” Scott instead holds up, as a counterforce, medieval town centers: “Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods...has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. ... Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.
Mindy Thompson takes the idea of hte protective nature of the labyrinth into the present era, in the form of the ‘mazeway.’ Writing about Root Shock or feelings of grief inherent in displacement and loss of neighborhood connections, Fullilove uses the term mazeway to describe the way that mammals move through their environment to secure the greatest chances of survival: they take promising paths, know the best places to find nourishment, and the best place to escape and hide from predators. This hard-won familiarity is best understood as an idiosyncratic and powerful source of hidden knowledge, not readily seen or parsed from the outside. As she writes about the mazeway -- “the near environment within which we find food, shelter, safety, and companionship” -- we “love the mazeway in which we are rooted, for it is not simply the buildings that make us safe and secure, but, more complexly, our knowledge of the ‘scene’ that makes us so.” Urban renewal, which destroyed the mazeway of interwoven ties and familiar haunts -- networks of reassurance, no matter how decayed the buildings -- wrenched security away from residents in the name of public safety and transparency.