Hostile Architecture And Its Problematic Side Effects

Devon Devito

Photo Courtesy of: Paydah – Wikimedia

Hostile architecture, also called Defensive Architecture in ‘Understanding Hostile Architecture’ is a method of design that is used to keep unhoused people from being able to sleep on public structures like benches and walls. This method of coercion has been around as early as the 19th century and has only recently gotten worse with the “growing hatred” of groups like unhoused people.

Things like tilted marble slabs in place of benches, or bent rounded wires made to form a bench-like structure that cannot be used as a resting place for more than a couple minutes. These new waves of ‘innovation’ towards architecture make long-term resting uncomfortable and make sleeping on them almost impossible.

This may not seem inherently bad to the average person but removing people’s ability to rest for long periods is neither fair nor safe. All sorts of people struggle with long-term standing, without the ability to sit down or rest many differently abled or even people who are simply overweight could suffer.

Alongside hostile architecture, places in the United Kingdom and United States have been utilizing something called “Hostile Noise” which is a frequency developed to unease people and animals. This has mainly been used to keep people from sleeping in public places like parks by creating unnerving and distracting sounds.

Not only do unhoused people suffer from less space to sit and rest either, anyone with disabilities, weight problems, or just people who can’t afford to stand for long periods without suffering also have to deal with the inconvenience of uncomfortable sitting while outside at public parks or busy city centers due to the governments need to remove unhoused people from public spaces. According to the Agenda for International Development, this is due to a ‘public desire’ to exclude unwanted groups of people or minorities, hostile architecture has become increasingly popular in the us.

Despite hostile architecture not being a relatively new thing at all, and being widely known about, the recently growing idea of it becoming ‘more aggressive’ has grown, with companies and governments trying very hard to keep homeless people away from public properties and spaces.

Unfortunately, if hostile architecture continues on its path and becomes a more vastly popular way of constructing, roughly 14,439 unhoused people in Colorado alone and over 771,800 people in America could be displaced from areas they feel safe in and make them unable to sleep or sit for long periods in places like public parks or centers and will only have the fairly hard to get aid of the government or underfunded aid of homeless shelters.

Activists have been trying for years to combat and protest the use and development of hostile architecture by posting about the dangers of creating such hostile public spaces, making it hard for differently abled people to exist in public spaces, but so far, no profound changes have been made to combat the creation and use of hostile architecture.