Will never not 
a good pony pic. 
They have them in Morecambe, Lancs, but they are reinforced steel to prevent criminals extracting the used syringes and selling them.
(The Lancashire coast is an excellent example of unsolved social problems; councils do their best with limited resources. Predictably, these were the people who voted to leave the EU, which has done more to help than any British government, while the well off people in South Lakeland voted Remain.)
It also used to deeply depress me that the UK had a derogation from European rules on street furniture design because we have so much vandalism that everything has to be reinforced and protected in ways not needed in other countries.
Itâs just part of Austinâs charm. I once watched someone on the bus having a very, very vigorous conversation with theirself. I say watched because she was deaf and the whole thing was in sign language.
I am convinced of this every time I visit a city in the UK. Itâs odd that one side of the human psyche wants to live in small groups close to nature and the other side wants to build huge rabbit warrens covered in concrete and tarmac. I find myself wondering if this started when the drying out of the Middle East caused the move to city states to manage food supplies and ensure that the rich were isolated from famines. Those city states look uncomfortably like anthills.
Cities can be great places if the buildings and the design are friendly, just as small groups can be hostile and wilderness unforgiving. Architecture, like any form of art elicits an emotional response in people. Some of us might feel it more than others but the response is clearly there.
Taking this to extremes, as itâs easy to love a pretty building, the Brutalist work on Londonâs South Bank which even being pig-ugly is (was, anyway) a much-loved building. Other Brutalist monstrosities, not so much.
I think most of this comes from the greater community interaction between building and local resident. Skaters found new uses for parts of South Bank and are (were?) encouraged rather than reviled and moved on. Providing a place for them also gives them a sense of ownership and belonging, even custodianship.
Architecture needs to consider itâs place within the greater community and the strategies it employs against people, from spiked railings to studded pavers send a message to that community about their worth.
Itâs insidious stuff, too. The shitâs everywhere. But once you know you are being manipulated to behave in a certain way, you can try to compensate for that.
Iâm a product of my environment and would be deeply unhappy away from a comfy sofa and a reliable web-pipe. OTOH, people were living here for 50,000 years and never needed either. In my utopia, thereâs more than enough room for both. 
Iâve seen that guy a lot too. I used to live in south Austin.
There are a few people around the capitol area who also talk to entities I canât see. They are harmless. I donât have a kid yet, but the homeless people are not the people I would worry the most about.
OddâI donât recall seeing that proposition being made anywhere in the OP.
Obviously you canât do one thing without doing everything. So the best thing to do is passively allow society to decay as rapidly as possible while actively treating fellow humans like vermin.
Has âCheer The Destructionâ been taken as a band name yet?
Way too enjoyable for crustpunk, sadly.
Maybe crustpop punk, if thatâs a thing.
Itâs right here:
When design solutions address the symptoms of a problem (like sleeping
outside in public) rather than the cause of the problem (like the myriad
societal shortcomings that lead to homelessness), that problem is
simply pushed down the street.
How is a bench designer (or any designer) supposed to deal with the causes of homelessness? Only in the most basic situations is going after the cause better than a stopping a symptom (like fixing a tooth instead of taking pain pills). Sometimes you canât figure out a cause. Sometimes the cause can be temporal or varied or intractable. Sometimes fixing a cause can be immoral - you canât totally stop homelessness without removing the freedom to be homeless.
And sometimes you have the wrong cause. We have a guy running for president right now who thinks the cause of terrorism is âradical Islamâ and who thinks the solution is carpet bombing. Over-reliance on solutionism is simplistic.
You have to combine that with free syrynge programs otherwise people will just break open the biohazard boxes to steal used syringes to reuse.
âŚwhich is something that the sane parts of the planet worked out thirty years ago. I am sadly unsurprised to learn that needle exchange programs are not universally available in the US.
Alex Wodak is one of my heroes:
I still donât read that as a condemnation of all bench designers who fail to correct major societal problems. Rather, I see it as an admonition to stop designing things to mitigate small problems while ignoring the systemic issueâbenches designed to stop homeless people from sleeping on them do nothing to get the homeless off the street and into shelters or jobs or whatever.
Thatâs not to say that every newly designed bench must also impart 40 acres and a mule. Canât we design a bench thatâs comfortable and functional without being a Dick Bench (âyeah, you can sit on me for five minutes, but you wonât enjoy it in the least, and I wonât allow anyone to do anything else on me except for sitâand to sit, you gotta be clean and have a job. And definitely no godamn skateboards!â).
Different from you, I often have strong urges to yelll directly at people.
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