Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.

多米尼加共和国的圣多明各是后来被称为“新世界”的最古老的持续有人居住的欧洲定居点，是大西洋奴隶贸易的中心。虽然它被称为“美洲黑人的摇篮”，但在这座城市的建筑和城市历史中几乎没有关于种族排斥和边缘化的讨论。本文研究了建筑和城市设计如何帮助加强殖民者对被奴役人民的控制。具体来说，我们将探索圣巴巴拉社区、它的教堂和被称为La Negreta的奴隶仓库。利用历史地图和档案文件，我们提请注意圣巴巴拉的空间和物质建设如何构成和维持压迫的社会和种族结构。