Oct 5, 2020 8:00 AM

How Cities (and Citizens) Create Hostile Environments

From uncomfortable benches to sidewalk boulders, objects that say "go away" can be hard to detect—until you start noticing them.

Adapted from stories found in The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohsltedt

Cities and their citizens are in constant dialog, but sometimes that conversation is one-sided. Master plans and grand designs aside, cities employ a wide array of smaller, more targeted, top-down strategies in public spaces, using designed objects to shape the behavior of residents. These strategies are embraced by some but criticized by others. To critics, dissuasive approaches (often called defensive design or hostile architecture) can be subtly pernicious and even downright cruel.

Defensive Design From the Top Down

Take public benches, for example, many of which are specifically crafted to let people take a short break without being able to fully relax. Unpleasant public seats at parks, bus stops, and airports are made to keep people from getting too comfortable. Discomfort is something we tend to think of as an unwanted byproduct of bad design, but in this case, the discomfort is the point. It would be easy to think of hostile architecture as a failure of design, but Selena Savić and Gordan Savičić, editors of the book Unpleasant Design, suggest that if the design does what it is supposed to, it is a success.

“A classic [example] is the bench with armrests in between” seats, says Savić, which “lets you rest your arm . . . but at the same time restrict[s] any other kind of use.” Armrests are the most common method of preventing people from sleeping in places where the establishment only wants them to sit. “Leaning” benches are also popular at bus stops. These lack a backrest and are often elevated and tilted to prevent actual sitting. Some critics have theorized that the seats in certain fast food chains were designed to serve as “15-minute chairs” that are intentionally too uncomfortable to sit in for a long period of time and thus encourage customer turnover.

The object that Savić considers a particular masterpiece of unpleasant design is the Camden bench. Unlike spikes, which scream their hostile intent, the Camden bench is innocuous in its appearance, although it’s rather lumpy and not particularly inviting. Designed by Factory Furniture for the London borough of Camden, the bench is a strange, angular, sculpted, solid chunk of concrete with rounded edges and slopes in unexpected places.

The Camden Bench has been described as the perfect “anti-object.”Photograph: Joe Dunckley/Alamy

The complex shape of this seating unit makes it virtually impossible to sleep on. It is also anti-dealer because it features no slots or crevices to stash drugs in; it is anti-skateboarder because the edges on the bench fluctuate in height to make grinding difficult; it is anti-litter because it lacks cracks that trash could slip into; it is anti-theft because recesses near the ground allow people to tuck bags behind their legs away from would-be criminals; and it is anti-graffiti because it has a special coating to repel paint. On top of all of this, the object is so large and heavy that it can also serve as a traffic barrier. One online critic called it the perfect “anti-object.” But perhaps the most common form of hostile seating is even subtler: the utter lack of it in some places. When you notice there is no place to rest for blocks and blocks, that is a design choice, too. In many cases, hostile design decisions and so-called sit-lie ordinances are paired together to create an environment that is unwelcoming to anyone seeking respite.

Hostile Architecture From the Bottom Up

Not all hostile architecture is city-imposed. Bottom-up interventionists can reshape cities, too. Citizens have been known to take matters into their own hands to solve the problems they feel officials have neglected. But these can be controversial and have unintended side effects.

Consider the case of two dozen boulders that appeared on a San Francisco sidewalk in late 2019. At first, no one was sure what to make of these massive stones that were a few feet tall and wide, and too big to be carried by a single rogue individual. Most people assumed that these additions had to be the work of the city, which has a history of using rocks to deter rough sleepers. But it soon came to light that this wasn’t a top-down imposition but rather a bottom-up intervention—the work of a group of neighbors seeking to disrupt illegal activities along the sidewalk. These residents had pooled together $2,000 to buy and place 24 huge stones on a public footpath just off of Market Street in the Mission District.

Reactions were swift. Some locals came out in favor of the boulders, citing frequent criminal activity along this stretch of sidewalk. Various activists, however, quickly came out against the rocks, arguing that the money could have been put to better use on more humane and substantive efforts to deal with underlying issues. Detractors began petitioning the city to remove the boulders. When officials failed to take action, one local artist posted a classified ad on Craigslist offering the two dozen boulders for free to anyone who wanted them. One critic on Twitter represented herself as their owner, writing, “We’re getting rid of our beautiful collection of landscape rocks [and] realized we don’t have enough space for them in our own home. We left them outside by the curb.” The stones, her post boasted, “have a lot of character—hues of tan and grey with some fresh moss.”

As the debate around the boulders heated up, some activists began to roll the rocks into the adjacent roadway. Caught up in the middle, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Department of Public Works expressed concern about these big obstructions now clogging up the street. So city workers stepped in—not to remove the stones as many assumed they would, but to put them back on the sidewalk. Their placement was apparently deemed to be compliant with city ordinances as there was enough space to walk beside them. The boulder battle didn’t end there, however. In the days that followed, activists continued to push the rocks back into the street while DPW workers continued to roll in with heavy machinery to hoist them back up onto the sidewalk. While the city brought in cones and yellow tape to deter the vigilantes, chalk messages began to appear in defense of the homeless people displaced by these stones. “It is a great theft if we don’t give to those in greater need than ourselves” and “I got neighbors. They more like strangers. We could be friends.” Some residents took issue with these and other anti-boulder messages, arguing that the stones were meant to deter dangerous drug dealers rather than rough sleepers.

Finally, enough was enough, and city officials stepped forward to bring this Sisyphean battle to an end. “At the request of the residents, we will be taking the boulders out,” San Francisco Public Works director Mohammed Nuru told The San Francisco Chronicle. Asked why, he explained that “some of the residents felt that they were being targeted” by opponents of the boulders. In short: residents who helped pay for putting the boulders in place went from feeling threatened by drug dealers to being afraid of harassment from urban activists who had been fired up by the spotlight cast on the back-and-forth, rock-rolling battle. The stones were removed and put into storage at taxpayer expense. In the aftermath, the future of this contested section of sidewalk remains uncertain. Nuru added that the DPW “will support whatever the residents want to do,” which could mean even bigger rocks that would be more difficult to remove.

For now, the physical situation has come full circle—the rocks are gone, leaving only some scratches on the sidewalk where they once rested. This conflict, though, reverberated across the city, galvanizing citizens interested in addressing issues like crime and homelessness. The rocks may not have had the effect their placers intended, but they started a larger conversation around urban issues and created an outsized impact in an unexpected way.

For better or worse, defensive designs limit the range of activities people can engage in. They can also create real problems for the elderly or disabled. Some of the goals of unpleasant designs can seem noble, at least to some people, but they follow a potentially dangerous logic with respect to public spaces. When supposed solutions address symptoms of a problem rather than the root causes, that problem is not solved but only pushed down the street to the next block or neighborhood. Spikes beget spikes, and targeted individuals are just moved around without addressing underlying issues. In many cases, these efforts can shift vulnerable populations to less visible and more dangerous areas. Regardless of whether one sees a given design as exclusionary but also serving a greater good or believes it to be hostile and offensive, it is important to be aware of the decisions that are being made by others for all of us.

Excerpted from THE 99% INVISIBLE CITY: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt. Copyright © 2020 by Roman Mars. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.