Hostile Design

The notion of “hostile design” or “hostile architecture” has become an important part of online critical analyses of the politics of public spaces, and it is now increasingly receiving academic attention. These lines of academic study and criticism at once build on long-established insights and research from across a variety of disciplines, and at the same time represent a reinvigorated focus on the specifics of the design of public spaces. An expanding variety of specific objects in public spaces are investigated as instances of hostile design. However, a few have become go-to examples. Public-space benches are often called out for the ways their designs make it difficult to use them as a place to sleep. Such designs can include the addition of armrests or seat dividers, or bucket seating arrangements. Another central example is spikes added to ledges to deter people from sitting or leaning. Skatestoppers—i.e., small, often metal nubs—are affixed to railings or ledges to ward off skateboarders looking to do tricks. And also a multitude of other objects have been criticized as examples of hostile design, from garbage can lids that deter trash picking to public-space security cameras that encourage people to behave themselves to loud sound systems that discourage loitering or camping to sprinkler systems that water down potential sleeping spaces to locks on fire hydrants to bollards to fences and even to the absence of expected public-space amenities (such as restrooms, water fountains, sidewalks, and shade). There are many populations that are targeted by hostile design, including loitering youths, skateboarders, and the poor. However, those living unhoused are possibly the most consistently subjected, and hostile design has become a part of the larger strategies that many cities take up in addressing the problem of homelessness. The topic of hostile design has enabled a new path into the study and criticism of long-standing issues in the politics of the built environment. The novelty and open-ended statuses of these ideas can be seen in the fact that there are many different terms in usage within this literature to refer to these same public-space objects in addition to “hostile design” and “hostile architecture,” including “unpleasant design,” “architectural exclusion,” “disciplinary architecture,” and “defensible space,” among others. And most often, the notion of hostile design is wielded as a term of criticism. Or as Petty 2016 (cited under Specific Objects of Hostility) puts it, hostile design is “a pejorative term usually used to signify opposition to the structure identified” (p. 69). Thus, for many scholars at least, these ideas retain a normative edge. While it is possible to connect work on these issues to a vast history of research and thought on urban space across a variety of disciplines, what follows in this article focuses on contemporary pieces on this specific topic.