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#hostilearchitecture — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hostilearchitecture, aggregated by home.social.

  1. #HostileArchitecture #homeless #disabled #elders

    "Civil engineering to achieve social engineering.

    Hostile architecture, also known as defensive architecture, exclusionary or defensive design or anti-homeless architecture is an urban-design strategy that utilizes elements of the built environment to intentionally guide or restrict behavior deemed undesirable by urban leaders. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others including youth, low-income people and people experiencing homelessness, who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous people. The effect is to also make the designs hostile to seniors, people with disabilities, pregnant women, and care givers for children and seniors.

    Roots in social control & segregation:
    Antecedents of 21st century hostile architecture can be seen in the following examples:

    Social Control: The narrow streets of 19th century Paris, France were widened to help
    the military quash protests;

    Segregation: Robert Moses an American urban planner, designed a stretch of the Long Island Southern State Parkway in 1929 with low stone bridges so that buses could not pass under them. This made it more difficult for people who relied on public
    transportation, disproportionately low-income and people of color, to visit the beach that wealthier, white, car-owners could visit.

    (. . .)

    Anti-homeless architecture

    As homelessness enters into its 5th decade as both a rural and urban crisis,
    not only in the USA but also in Europe and Japan, elected officials instead
    of investing in affordable and accessible housing, have invested in anti- homeless architecture as a way to make it uncomfortable and encourage people experiencing homelessness to move on to another community.

    Tobias Armborast, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore, architects and
    urban designers, inventory more than 150 'tools' or 'weapons' that are used
    by planners, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers and community
    activists that can be used to answer the question, 'who gets to be where?'
    in their 2021 book, *The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion*."

    nationalhomeless.org/wp-conten

  2. Really good point about the importance of #publicseating for #accessibility. This has been a big argument for many years here in #cville with the competing desire for #hostilearchitecture to harden public space against our growing #homeless population

  3. I also found an unfortunate example of #HostileArchitecture under a bridge. Seeing this makes me wonder where our priorates should really be.

    #Stratford #StratfordUponAvon #PublicSpaces #archetecture