Hostile Architecture

 Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of hostile architecture and what it says about the priorities of the community and society as a whole. For those uninformed, hostile architecture is a type of urban design that uses decorative or environmental elements to restrict behavior.

In this example from Canada, steel maple leaf decor is used as a way to prevent skateboard grinding. Of course, this is a relatively tame thing to attempt to dissuade, although it is still kind of a jerk move. However, there are other aspects that are less passive.

These "decorative" fences were actually put up as an attempt to stop street vendors, with seemingly no regard for how obtrusive something like this would be for everyone else, not including how it's almost illegal considering you need to have a certain amount of space open on a sidewalk for the wheelchair-bound to pass through safely.

    I'm sure everyone saw this coming, but a very common target of hostile architecture is the homeless population. I think it's safe to assume that everyone in this class has seen a bench that looks something like this.

Well, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, these "dividers" are actually anti-homeless measures under the guise of a structural element. If you think about it, it's an entirely unhelpful feature; armrests aren't so sorely needed that they have to be added to public benches. Instead, it's to keep people from comfortably lying down, which more often than not tends to be the homeless population.

This is a personal favorite of mine, because not only is it there to prevent homeless people from sitting in a place where they would be protected from the weather, but it's also ugly as sin and adds zero decorative value. There is literally no other reason for this thing to exist than to keep homeless people from having a place to sit or sleep.

    There are plenty of other examples of this kind of feature all around, and when you begin to learn about hostile architecture as a practice, you start to see it everywhere. Decorative rocks are commonly used to keep the homeless from sitting or lying down. Some ledges or half-fences have little decorations on the top that are specifically meant to keep people from sitting on them, even when there's no other seating around. Of course, most of the time, these are directed at people who are homeless. However, homeless people and non-homeless people have the same needs in terms of sitting or reclining. At some point, you stop preventing homeless people from being comfortable, and you start preventing everyone else from being comfortable as well. It's interesting to see how much society hates people who are homeless, to the point that they actively begin sabotaging themselves in an attempt to keep them out of sight. At what point when you, as an urban designer, are asking your architects to put decorative spikes on the ground so nobody can sit there, do you begin to wonder if the measures you've put in place to attack a specific subset of the population is attacking the rest of the population as well?