A plea against hostile architecture
2023-07-28
If you have travelled to big (or even medium sized) cities in recent years, I will probably have noticed rather stranger looking benches, seats and art in public places such as squares or subway/train/bus stations and wondered why the hack they were designed this way. Unfortunately, this doesn't have anything to do with modern art, but instead a terrible concept called hostile architecture, which I will explore in this article together with its effects. So, let's take a look...
In a nutshell, hostile architecture is the idea of designing public spaces in such a way that makes them unattractive for certain behaviour (such as sleeping and skating) and therefore groups of people (mostly homeless individuals and skateboarders) in order to remove them from the public image of a place. This can be wanted due to predominantly negative associations with these groups, outdated stereotypes or the plan to make an area more attractive for foreign investors. Its modern form is derived from the popular design philosophy " Crime prevention through environmental design " (CPTED), which aims to prevent crime or protect property through the three strategies of natural surveillance, natural access control and territorial enforcement.
To make things a little less abstract, here is one example of such architecture I recently came across. It has the friendly name Mr. Fill nd is a smart public trash bin, which combines actually nice features like a solar-powered trash press and on-demand emptying with needlessly restrictive features like its one-way fill port preventing homeless people from collecting valuable returnable bottles or other goods out of it. This behaviour doesn't hurt anybody, these people rely on the money they make from it to keep their head above the water and they are actually doing the environment (and indirectly society) a favour as these bottles would not be recycled as a part of ordinary trash. Yet, this behvaiour isn't wanted by decisions makers and effectively restricted by this very product. Sadly, I also have to note that there are countless special manufacturers of these objects, which are hyper optimized towards appealing to decision makers, and this one isn't especially bad, but just something I remember.
Now, you might be asking youself "What's the matter? Why is this so bad?". First of all, this practice is not proven to work in terms of fulfilling the original goal of reducing crime, but certainly makes a place feel less welcoming to everyone. It also has unintentional side effects on elderly people, people with disabilities and for example pregnant women, whose use of hostile benches and so on is heavily restricted despite not being the target demographic. But most importantly, this strategy only focuses on the symptoms, but not the real causes of the major social problems leading to these people ending up in the streets. By the very idea of it, it is only a treatment at best, but not a cure. It doesn't even mind the non-existing or broken welfare systems, the unnecessarily complicated hurtles to overcome for simple and the astronomically high requirements for moderate jobs or extremily overpriced rents due to constant gentrification taking place.
Therefore, atleast in my book this concept is a highly unsocial thing to pursue as we are excluding the people, who are most in need for help and attention, from everyday life just because they aren't nice to look at (or better said what they do isn't). What we really should be doing is listening to their problems, ensuring their issues are relevant in the political discussion and ultimately putting pressure on those in charge to revert the terrible decisions they made in the past, make public places welcoming to everyone again and hopefully restructure our welfare systems altogether while they are at it. We tend to take the things we have for granted and forget the power each of us has as we seem to only be a tiny gear in the machinery of society, but most of us live in a democracy and politicians depend on our votes at the end, which in the larger picture actually puts us in charge So, let's use this power for good together!
Last but certainly not least, I truely believe that this is a prime example of today's trend towards only caring about your personal socio-economic circle (from the perspective of the decision makers) and how you appear to others (from the perspective of the city), which is likely to destroy us, if we choose to follow this path indefinitely. The alarming effects of constant self-portrayal of individuals via social media are already visible and range from self-distructive behaviour to all kinds of mental illnesses. I don't even want to imagine how this will look like on a society scale! So, be aware of what you are looking at the next time to see a strange looking bench out in the wild, spread word about these issues and let me know about your thoughts in the comments down below...