Anti-homeless Architecture

 

For homeless people, finding a dry, unused spot to sit or lay for a few hours can be the only opportunity to get some rest. Aside from homeless shelters which fill up quickly and are usually overcrowded, there are few options for those living on the streets as it is. Still, some property owners and city planning committees have begun utilizing new strategies to push the homeless away from the areas that they tend to use most.

Often referred to as “hostile architecture” or “defensive design,” many cities have begun to see an increase in layout and landscaping designed specifically to restrict and exclude certain uses or groups of people from public spaces. One of the most common uses for this type of design is to deny loitering or even just general use by the homeless. In many cases, hostile architecture is intentionally designed to blend-in and be unnoticed by those who are unaffected by it, but chances are you have personally witnessed many examples of it in public spaces whether you knew it’s true purpose at the time or not. There are all sorts of different strategies used to make areas unusable to the homeless, from strategically placed planters and boulders to literal bars and spikes sectioning areas off and making it impossible to lay down comfortably.

The biggest problem with this sort of design is that it doesn’t generally benefit anyone. Hostile architecture is a band-aid solution for property owners and urban planners to push the homeless out of sight, but it doesn’t actually do anything to decrease the homeless population. Further, most of the strategies used actually make the spaces less convenient for regular use as well, ultimately creating an uninviting atmosphere and environment. For example, one of the most common uses of hostile architecture to dissuade usage by the homeless are bars or “armrests” retrofitted onto park benches so that it’s impossible to lay across the whole bench and get some rest. More hostile examples include gaps between walls and awnings so that rain can pour onto the areas a homeless person might sleep, or even spikes installed directly into the ground so that they can’t sit or lay in the area. There are countless strategies employed by users of hostile architecture to “solve” the problem of homeless loitering, but at the end of the day, none of them are actually solving anything; they’re just hoping to push it out of view so that they don’t have to think about it. This practice should be considered both inhumane and wasteful. Using funding and resources to intentionally make homeless people’s lives even more difficult, rather than to help lift them out of their difficult situation is counterproductive to improving the human condition.

 To see more examples of hostile design strategies and read more about the topic, click here.