“Defensive architecture” aimed at the homeless as a deliberate, considered kind of cruelty.
By Lisa Wade, PhD
I encourage everyone to go read this very smart and very sad essay from Alex Andreuo at The Guardian. It’s a condemnation of defensive architecture, a euphemism for strategies that make the urban landscape inhospitable to the homeless.
They include benches with dividers that make it impossible to lie down, spikes and protrusions on window ledges and in front of store windows, forests of pointed cement structures under bridges and freeways, emissions of high pitched sounds, and sprinklers that intermittently go off on sidewalks to prevent camping overnight. There is also perpetually sticky anti-climb paint and corner urination guards, plus “viewing gardens” that take up space that might be attractive to homeless people:
The examples above and below are from a collection at Dismal Garden. Here’s a picture of anti-encampment spikes featured at The Guardian:
This is to discourage urination:
This is to take up space so people can’t camp on the sidewalk:
Andreuo writes of the psychological effect of these structures. They tell homeless people quite clearly that they are not wanted and that others not only don’t care, but are actively antagonistic to their comfort and well being. He says:
Defensive architecture is revealing on a number of levels, because it is not the product of accident or thoughtlessness, but a thought process. It is a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass. It reveals how corporate hygiene has overridden human considerations…
If the corporations have turned to aggressive tactics, governments seem to simply be in denial. They offer few resources to homeless people and the ones they do offer are insufficient to serve everyone. Andreuo continues:
We curse the destitute for urinating in public spaces with no thought about how far the nearest free public toilet might be. We blame them for their poor hygiene without questioning the lack of public facilities for washing… Free shelters, unless one belongs to a particularly vulnerable group, are actually extremely rare.
He then connects the dots. “Fundamental misunderstanding of destitution,” he argues, “is designed to exonerate the rest from responsibility and insulate them from perceiving risk.” If homeless people are just failing to do right by themselves or take the help available to them, then only they are to blame for their situation. And, if only they are to blame, we don’t have to worry that, given just the right turn of events, it could happen to us.
While being anti-homeless is bad enough (why not put the money towards solving some of the issues that contribute to homelessness, instead of spending it installing fucking spikes everywhere?), this is also anti-disabled, without even realizing it (provided we ignore the huge correlation between disability and poverty, like everybody else seems to).
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had to suddenly sit down on a window ledge or risk falling, or the number of times I’ve had to pee right-the-fuck-now while I was on medication that affected the frequency and suddenness of my urination. I sit on windowsills and stairs when I can, because my knees make it hard for me to stand up again when I sit on the ground. I end up sitting on the ground a lot, anyway. I’ve had to lay down in parks and on sidewalks, because I’ve been suddenly overcome by nausea, dizziness, or an indescribable feeling of unwellness that probably only other chronically-ill people could ever understand. And I’ve sort of peed everywhere. Some proper benches and some public bathrooms that don’t close after 10pm and over the whole damn winter would make a huge difference in my life. And I still have a home to go to.
So I guess what I’m saying is, if you give any fucks about disabled people, you’ll stick up for the homeless. Homeless people are actively hated, and that’s really fucking bad. Disabled people aren’t even fucking thought about until we become homeless, and that’s an all-too-common scenario.
