The article covers this, as in teenagers being discouraged from hanging out in specific areas, areas where people should keep moving. Anti-loitering devices do not equate to anti-homeless sentiments. You design for the behaviors you want, and in some areas you want people to keep moving.
As far as I can tell, in most cities, that “just keep moving” area is everywhere. What with spikes on the sidewalks under the eaves of all the businesses, and every single bench you come across being apparently designed to give you scoliosis.
I think it’s pretty obvious that all these anti-loitering devices are just treating a symptom of much worse social diseases. Diseases like a terrible, gaping lack of empathy. Diseases like a hatred for the misfortunate and the sick. Diseases like just-world thinking in an obviously uncaring and indifferent world. And making what amounts to all public space uninhabitable doesn’t do anything to help people who need to inhabit these spaces since everywhere else charges money or makes you listen to how much of a dirty worthless sinner you are in order to stay there.
It’s putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound in our society. And what’s worse is that for some reason, the decision makers think that platinum-plating the band-aid and making sure it’s nice and pretty and not really all that good at its stated job is somehow more important than actually trying to heal the wound.
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I think the design of benches is the absolute dumbest possible thing to focus on if that is the concern. Simple access to public toilets would be way higher on my list, given that my kids have stepped in human waste, and been exposed to a man taking a piss from about 10 feet away… both in SF, and both recently.
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Exactly. City councils spend a lot of time and money on anti-loitering devices and making the public space relatively uninhabitable when they could be doing things like housing initiatives for the homeless.
That so much detail right down to unusable benches goes into making the public spheres uninhabitable is perverse when they could actually be solving problems with non-hostile architecture. For instance renovating abandoned housing to make it usable again.
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Again, I think you have to do both of those things. Because the people you are discouraging from loitering are also rich white people and middle class white teenagers. They are every bit as annoying. More so because they have plenty of options.
Let me tell you about the time my kids were trying to use a play structure and these two white, middle class teenagers were using it as their personal teenage crisis life hangout club …
So? Should we make play structures unusable too? Like, maybe with barbed wire fixtures, or a 20-minute repeating electrical shock to encourage children to wrap up playtime? Maybe a system of quarter-powered swing sets.
So some teenagers are hanging out in a kiddie park. You have a mouth, and a brain. We’re all smart monkeys, we can do things like conflict resolution and general sharing. And if the teens don’t want to share, then that’s a problem for police (in a decent society where being a cop isn’t also a license to wantonly murder people.)
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It strikes me that some of this is a conversation about public space, who gets to use it, how much, and why or why not?
Lately, public space is being understood more and more as space available for some and not others. On top of that, much of our public space is being handed over to private hands. The erosion of public space is the erosion of space where ideas can be hashed out.
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Nope, but the idea is that play structures are a space that serve a particular purpose, that is… for play. If you’re not playing, then … why are you there? And why, exactly, would it be wrong to design that structure to encourage those behaviors, and discourage others?
Believe me, I was giving those teenagers my very best eye daggers as my kids tried to play around them on the play structure.
Anyway, I would posit that hanging out and giggling about the lyrics to the latest My Chemical Romance song with your teenage friend isn’t the purpose of that space or that play structure. I mean I guess in some broader metaphysical sense everything could be play?
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I’ll second that with a story of my own.
There was a park nearby with a children playground. At night, it was used as a sleep pad by men definitely too old to be children. As toilets, they use a corner of the park. I should say that they actually tried to be considerate and used the corner of the park most remote from the playground, but it still was a nuisance. The smell and parents had to instruct the children not to play hide and seek over there, etc…
Now, the asnwer could be “more public toilets”. Yes and no: they would have to be open at 6 or 5 in the morning, which is the time the other park users needed them. Are we going to let the toilets open all night?
And then, I have another story. France installed automatic toilets in several large cities. It is very simple: you open the door with a coin (about a quarter $ at the time) and when you leave the toilet automatically cleans itself (the bowl rotates in the wall to be scrubed and there are pressure jets to clean the floor). Guess what? At night, they were used by an other type of business where women (mostly) found out that a heated private room for 1/4$ was just what they needed. You don’t necessarily need a bed for a quick job. A large number of these automatic toilets have been removed.
So I’ll second the opinion expressed here that public facilities have an intended usage and that some way is necessary so that they are not appropriated for a different and mostly private usage. And that is always a problem. If something is there: a bench, a playground, a toilet, some humans will think of a way to use it for something else it was not intended for. Which in turns deprives the person it was intended for of its use.
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Well, you keep telling yourself that. I hope you never learn otherwise.
I have no first hand knowledge of what things are like in the US. I do have some knowledge of life in Germany and the UK.
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Both would be great.
That’s not what is happening in most places.
London for example used to have a very strong programme of help for the homeless. The aim was to ensure that no one would have to spend more than one night on the street before having access to a safe, warm place to sleep. It included referrals to support services such as healthcare, work training, etc.
Those programmes worked. In 1980 there were thought to be about 1000 people sleeping rough on the streets of London every night. As a result of the various programmes put in place that number dropped to about 200-300. The numbers in the rest of the UK dropped by about 70%.
They also cost money. That money has been cut, and cut, and cut again and again. Numbers of rough sleepers are on the rise.
The benches, etc. keep getting installed.
I’ll wholeheartedly second the view that more should be done to solve the cause of the problem. One of the things that can be done to achieve that is highlighting what those in charge of public spaces are actually doing and what they are not.
They are actually putting in place measures that actively make life more difficult for those who already find life quite difficult enough to cope with. They are not (generally) putting sufficient effort and resources into helping those people with their difficulties.
As you and others have pointed out, many of the public support the measures that are being taken.
There is nothing wrong in others pointing out the flip side which is that the poor (and the young 
) are simply being shoved from place to place until they finally find somewhere they are permitted to exist (if they can find somewhere).
On that note, where should these emo-teens have been hanging out? Where is the place for that purpose?
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One of the things you learn in design/architecture school is that however you intend people to use/not use spaces isn’t necessarily how they will use/not use the space. And that isn’t necessarily bad, except to say to the designer/architect that perhaps they hadn’t spent enough time considering how the space would be used, so if there’s any failing of the bench it’s that of the designer for not considering that people might sleep on it.
Also, if an architect/designer creates benches that are purposefully more uncomfortable that designer is probably an asshole.
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Why wouldn’t we? It’s not like people don’t go to the bathroom at all hours of the day… imagine pulling into a rest stop on the interstate at 1 AM only to find the bathrooms were locked at 10. That would be stupid. The point of a public toilet is to be there for people to use it.
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I think this is a backwards way to look at it (and we’re all guilty of thinking like this from time to time). Someone designing a more uncomfortable bench is doing the job they were hired for. It’s generally not within the scope of the person, project, or company to solve homelessness. You can take the ethical high road and pass on the contract, but you’re never going to solve homelessness from the bottom-up with ethical bench design (and you might just have to find a new line of work).
It’s easy to blame someone designing a bench, or the homeless person sleeping on the bench — but neither are the problem (and a lot of the public facility problems are products of each other). The homeless person needs somewhere off the ground to sleep, the bench designer needs clients, the drug user abusing public toilets needs somewhere to safely do drugs, the guy peeing on the side of your building needs a public toilet.
It’s probably not enough to redistribute all the public/private money spent on uncomfortable benches and self-cleaning public toilets, but I suspect it would be better spent on the root issues.
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