Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Hostile Architecture

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Those armrests in the middle of benches aren’t just for your comfort, they’re intended to keep the homeless from laying on them. Cities are filled with these mean-spirited inconveniences. But who���s to say how a person should use a bench?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh Chucks here too. Jerry's here somewhere. She's gotten a little lost, but we'll find her eventually. So this is short stuff. Well, I know what Jerry's not doing. She's not over there sleeping on a park bench.

No, not these days. Not in any given city, Chuck, I'll tell you that much. That's right. You did a great job with this. This is something I had never heard of. It's called hostile architecture. Or what are some of the other names there? Defensive architecture or exclusionary design. That's right.

And this is a topic that if our buddy Roman Mars, a 99% invisible has not covered, I would be shocked and amazed. You'd eat a 10 gallon hat. I would. And I'm sure they have covered this. But this is the idea that someone will design something, this became pretty popular in the 1990s, design something for generally an urban setting

to prevent people from generally laying down or loitering. Yeah, taking up residence more than a few minutes on a public piece of architecture or, or furniture or something like a bench. Right? Like if you go today and you sit down on a bench, it's very, there's a really good chance that there's going to be an armrest for you. And you know, are you like, Oh, this is really nice.

Like in the middle. Yeah. But if you are unhoused, if you're a homeless person, that's a problem for you because you can't lay on that bench. Cause that armrest is right there in the middle. Yeah, but if you are unhoused, if you're a homeless person, that's a problem for you because you can't lay on that bench because that armrest is right there in the middle. That's hostile architecture. It's design of public stuff that is created with the express purpose of keeping people from using it aside from very specific approved upstanding ways.

That's right. It's not always just people. You might see businesses that have spikes, anti-pigeon spikes above signage, or billboard signs that have spikes. That's to keep those pigeons from pooping all over it. It's another example. Sure. And it's not exactly new. It became really big in urban design in the 1990s, like you said, but, um, the earliest I saw, uh, was, went back to the 19th century in towns like Venice, Italy. This is good.

They, they added, um, urine deflectors and they're still there today. If you look up Venice urine deflectors, they, they got really creative with putting these in and you might just walk right past them and not realize what you're walking past. But the point of it is, is it's like a, say like a, a, a sloped mound going up about chest height in a corner of a public building. If you pee in that corner, your pee is going to be deflected right back onto you, so you're not going to pee right there. That's an example of early hostile architecture. Yep, it's

pretty funny. If you Google Venice urine deflectors, it's right there. Yeah. They're still covered in pee. Yeah, they are still. It's really gross, but they're also pretty in their way. It's like an old-timey design, you know? Yeah. You know, in Amsterdam they have those, I don't know if they still do, but when I went in the 90s they had the, it's just sort of a cylinder that you go and stand in. I guess as a man, I don't think I saw any women using these, so you go and stand in, I guess as a man, I don't think I saw any women using these,

so you can pee-pee, but it's just like a cylinder, but it's not like a, it's like a porta-potty, but it's open air. So you kind of, it's kind of a spiral. So you walk just around a very quick curve, so no one can see you, but your head is above, you know, the top of it. So you're just standing there, everything.

So you can see like, yeah, the look of relief on the person's face as they're peeing? Yeah, you're just standing there peeing in front of everyone, but you've got a little concrete thing sort of wrapped around you from the neck down. Man, if you're an exhibitionist, you could do worse than go around Amsterdam. In lots of ways.

So the whole idea of these things, and this is a guy you found named Robert Rosenberger who is associate professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech here in Atlanta. He said it keeps it kind of invisible to most people, which is part of the larger strategy, perhaps 99% invisible even, because the whole idea is like, they don't want you to be aware of this stuff. They just want your average person to walk along and think like, no, my city just cares about everyone. And so they wanted you to have an armrest in the middle of a park bench.

Exactly. So for you, that's great. Or you're sitting on one of those like concrete slab benches and the little like not spikes but little mini slabs of metal that are baked into that concrete slab, they don't bother you at all. You can sit between them even and maybe kind of rub them with your finger. It feels nice.

But if you're a skateboarder, you can't rail slide on that concrete slab. That's another reason hostile architecture was developed to thwart skateboarders. If you drive through Atlanta and the downtown connector, you will notice these very large rocks and many boulders under the overpasses there. And that was because Atlanta had a tent population of unhoused people living under these to keep from being rained on. So, city of Atlanta came in, stacked a bunch of huge rocks under there, and now the tents are mere feet away getting rained on.

Yes, so yeah, but to the person driving by, if they even notice those rocks and think about them, they might conclude that they're for erosion prevention. Another really common form of hostile architecture or hostile design is keeping really really really bright lights in places like subway alcoves or other other places where somebody might sleep. But to you, the person who doesn't need to sleep out in the public, that's just a safety measure, right? So like you said the whole thing is designed to just be completely invisible until you try to use them in the ways that they're designed to prevent you from using them. That's right.

Maybe let's take a break. We'll talk about a few more examples in London and New York and elsewhere, and then talk about what the problem is with this right after this. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host, Martine Hack, for season three of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio Production, and partnership with Argenics. From myasthenia gravis, or MG, to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy,

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All right, so we've mentioned a few examples of hostile architecture. Another big one that you've seen in New York, if you've mentioned a few examples of hostile architecture. Another big one that you've seen in New York, if you've been lately, have been, they're called leaning bars. Instead of a bench, it will be like against the wall of a subway or just maybe on the backside of a sidewalk. And it's just a row of sort of slightly slanted about bottom height where you can just kind of rest your bottom and lean and catch a little bit of a break without sitting. New York, I did

look these up and they have sold them or at least part of the sale to people is like, hey, this is actually good because it helps people that can't have trouble sitting down and standing up. So that's a big and that is a genuine plus for something like this. But it's also to keep people from sleeping and, you know, potentially dirty, fouling that bench in some way. Yeah, and I mean, if they were adding leaning bars to the benches that are already there, rather than taking out the benches and replacing them with leaning bars, I think their case would be a little more solid. Agreed.

There's a very famous piece of hostel architecture called the Camden Bench that was designed back in 2012 and the Camden Borough of London, their council, commissioned it. And it is a two-ton slab of concrete. It is a big mass, rectangular mass of concrete. If you look at a design for it, it slopes in different directions, so there's no part of it that's flat. The top side, the very top point of it, is a meandering ridge,

and there's basically no features whatsoever. And all of this is designed to keep people from sleeping on it, to keep people from sitting on it too long. It's almost like a leaning kind of thing too, but you're sitting. It's just not particularly comfortable. And then also it deters drug dealing too,

because there's nowhere for the drug dealer to kind of like hide their stash underneath the bench, because there isn't really an underneath the bench. No, and they're not great looking. No, they're not, but they are fascinating looking, especially if you look at a diagram of them to me. Yeah, in real life they're pretty ugly. In Canada, they're in Victoria, BC, they have blue lights in public bathrooms because there's an IV drug problem there and they're trying to prevent people from using drugs, injecting

drugs because you can't detect your vein with that blue light happening, which is something that I never would have considered. I never would have either, but apparently it works pretty well. Uh, another one is to just not provide the things that you would create hostile architecture for in the first place. Like, so just don't put benches out. Don't provide public washrooms, like remove all that stuff that the public uses and you

won't have to worry about homeless people using them in ways you don't want. That's the thinking, at least in places like Toronto, and that kind of approach is called ghost amenities. I love that. I mean, I don't love that. I love that it's called ghost amenities because it really is, it almost calls it out.

Yeah, and then this final one we'll mention is pretty incredible. This is in Shandong, China. They're called pay and sit benches, just like you could have a little pay restroom or something. This is a bench that you can deposit your coin in, a little thing on the side. And if you do that, the little nubby metal spikes will sink down and you can actually sit on the bench when your time is up.

Those little metal spikes will rise up and poke you in the bottom and you will get up and you think, oh, that's pretty ingenious. And then you realize this was designed as protest art by a German sculptor named Fabian Brunzing. So it was protest art, but China was like, hey, that's a pretty good idea. A great idea is a great idea. Yeah.

And that one to me is the most... Hostile. I guess hostile or just kind of like mean. It's like, you know, most people have half a euro, except the people we don't want sleeping on benches. Yeah. You know? Like it's just tantalizingly out of the way.

So you know, we promised to talk about the ethical side of this thing. Obviously they're targeting populations that are vulnerable and saying, we don't want you here. What they're trying to do is say, like, hey, on your commute in Atlanta, we don't want you to be subject to seeing this on your drive home from your office to your house. So get rid of Tent City and put up these boulders. We don't want you on the walk home from your office in New York to your apartment. We don't want you to walk through the park and see this, even though it's a public park

and like who gets to decide who can sit on a park bench in a public park. Right. Yeah, that's the big question is like who makes the decision on what's the appropriate use of a bench? And if it's that most people sit on a bench, aren't homeless people still members of the community? And if they use a bench in a different way, is that really illegitimate? And if it's illegitimate, is it really just because some people find it distasteful to see somebody sleeping on a bench. And that's the ethical quandary that people who are opposed to hostile architecture find themselves in, because it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And probably the biggest problem, aside from like the actual individual impact it has on homeless people, and not just homeless people too, Chuck, a couple of overlooked groups

that are affected by hostile architecture are the disabled, the elderly, pregnant people. Like it's not just the homeless who are affected by this but they are, it is the homeless that are specifically targeted by hostile architecture. And the probably the biggest problem is it's that's no kind of response to homelessness. Like move it along, get out of here. We don't wanna see you. We want you to be more invisible than you already are, have less of a voice than you already are

or than you already have. That is a terrible response to homelessness, but that's exactly the point of hostile architecture. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. And then there's one other just kind of quick point to this too is if public benches are approved to be sat on while you're on your way to work, on your way to shop, there's an architectural historian named Ian Borden who said that that means that the mentality projected by hostile architecture is that we were only citizens to the degree that were either working or consuming goods. And that that's what that hostile

architecture sets. Like if you're not doing that then you can't sit here. You can't lay down on this. I wonder what Roman Maher said. I'm gonna go find that episode and listen. Okay. While Chuck's gonna do that I'm going to stop talking and you put those two things together and short stuff is out.