I think much of the discussion in this topic was conflating
keeping people moving in public areas
with
fuck the homeless!
I don’t really see the former as equivalent to the latter. What you’re saying with these kinds of designs is “please don’t hang out here for very long periods of time”, and that statement is equally and universally applied to all human beings in that environment. What you’re definitely not doing is making any kind of blanket statement about the morality of homelessness.
I mean, you might as well argue that fences make bad neighbors. And yet, we have doors, we have fences.
Doesn’t that depend heavily on the nature of the public space? A national park, for example, versus a bus stop? Are all public spaces identical and compatible with every possible human use?
I’m just saying, it’s kind of evil to intentionally go to lengths to make the perfectly functional intentionally shitty. Especially when these fixtures are meant ostensibly for public use.
How can the public “use” a bench when someone is sleeping on it? The design encourages actual public use versus camping and monopolizing the space. That is entirely the point.
See, this is the crux of the issue, but not in the way you think. Those articles are about life in a failed state, not homelessness per se. In the real world, you landlord can’t just pack your stuff up because your roommate stopped paying rent. There’s due process they would have to go through, and they couldn’t just remove you. There’s also a safety net to catch people who get caught up in a confluence of things that might otherwise make them homeless.
Remember, you’re on the internet. The people you talk to aren’t necessarily from somewhere like Somalia or the United States.
Your argument is fine assuming there is somewhere these measures are not in place where people can go instead.
Unfortunately, the tendency is for everywhere to put these measures in place.
So the effect ends up being “Please don’t hang out anywhere for very long periods of time other than in places where you are spending sufficient money to justify your taking up the space” (i.e. a café or restaurant or bar or in a place you own or rent).
This applies to all of us not just the homeless.
And the length of time covered by “not very long” is also ludicrous in many cases. Some of this furniture is so uncomfortable that it is really only decorative rather than in anyway functional.
It’s telling that the designer himself in the article admits that the Serpentine bench wasn’t originally designed to be uncomfortable.
They designed the bench to look nice and noticed that people were buying it precisely because it was uncomfortable for people to sleep on and made that into a marketing feature.
Fast forward to 2012 and the Camden bench is designed to specific criteria from the client to be impossible to sleep on.
So is every other piece of street furniture, doorways, ledges, windowsills, etc.
Fair enough, we don’t want the poor cluttering up our streets and public places but then we should at least ensure they have somewhere else to go.
Scrooge has been brought up a few times in this thread but even Scrooge thought there should be somewhere for the destitute to go even if it was the workhouse or prison.
Even in the most law-abiding state, they can physically throw you and your things out on the street.
You may then be able to sue them and get back in. Do you have the money for that? Probably not. Even if you do, you need somewhere to go in the meantime. Where is that?
You might even be able to simply go to the police and have them let you back in but probably not since in most jurisdictions that would be classed as a civil issue rather than criminal and even if it is, it is going to be lower on the police priority scale than say murder, robbery or burglary. They will probably fob you off.
If you do get back in, how long do you think your tenancy is going to last and how pleasant is living there going to be?
There are bad landlords everywhere. I’ve come across a few whose preferred method of removing tenants was to avoid those pesky lawyers’ fees and courts in preference to sending a few lads round with baseball bats to ‘persuade’ the tenants that they would in fact like to give notice and move out pronto.
Even if your landlord is law-abiding, in most jurisdictions failure to pay the rent in full and on time will enable the landlord to evict you quite quickly.
Whether it’s quick or slow, violent or through the courts, homelessness will result.
I think it is the same issue. For a tragedy to happen, “commons” must be over-used. “Commons” will only be overused if there is a finantial interest in using them: they produce food, money, living space, whatever. That, in turn, raises the interest of the rich and powerful to fence them for their exclusive use.
Same here: hostile street furniture only exists in attractive large cities where everyone wants to live. They don’t exist in derelict small towns where so few people want to live that abandonned housing is common.
The “tragedy of the commons” is not a historical event, it’s a historical rhetorical device.
Although the phenomena described makes some theoretical sense, the primary role of the concept has been as a political tool to discredit and suppress the public ownership of shared assets.
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A homeless person on a bench isn’t overusing it. They’re just using it. The idea behind the tragedy of the commons hypothetical is that overgrazing destroys the land so that no-one can use it.
That is not the case in this situation. The bench is not destroyed, and the homeless person is just as valid a user as anyone else.
In any case, my point was that “hostile architecture” does not just appear where housing/public space is in short supply.
It appears where there is an intersection between people with money and the destitute together with a lack of adequate support and assistance for the destitute.
The destitute have nowhere else they can reasonably go - since they have nowhere private to go, they have to spend their time in public spaces and they might as well do so where the people with money are - but those with money do not want to have to deal with the destitute and the design of public spaces reflects that.
I would say the appearance of fresh “hostile architecture” is a sign of a failing economy/society. It appears where there is an increase or perceived increase in the numbers of the destitute together with a failure to take any actually useful steps to mitigate the rise.
Sure, the government or councils or municipalities need to address the underlying issues. The problem with this guy is he’s helping them to kick the can down the road. He’s the handmaiden of brutality.
That is an interesting theory, there is some truth in what you are saying.
Still: I am not entirely convinced by this theory. Why? Because it so happens that I spend a lot of time in a rural area with no uber-rich, plenty of available housing and social programs to use it for what we may call the “destitute” in the absence of a better word. No, it is not in the USA.
The “destitute” cause enormous problems, far more than anyone else. Last year, for example, the local community (about 500 people) had to clean 5 metric tons of rubish left by them. The community pays for that. The people are not impressed.
Now, I am not saying that all “destitute” cause problems or that the non-“destitute” don’t cause problems. I am saying that the complex problems of moden cities will not be solved by park benches to sleep on.
