For Homeless People, Hostility is Built Right into the Landscape
It was an otherwise unremarkable morning when Pawel Koseda was discovered slumped over a garden hedge, his 37-year-old body impaled on metal spikes. It would take days for Koseda’s circumstances to be made clear. Initially, nobody even knew his name.
“His hoodie was pulled over his back, which was blue,” Ed Boord, who discovered Koseda, told reporters at the Independent. “I shouted at him, but he was dead.”
An investigation into the death later revealed that Koseda, a former university teacher who struggled with homelessness and alcohol addiction, was sleeping on a garden bench when he fell into a pit of hostile architecture, succumbing to an unfathomably painful end.
Close friends recall a brilliant, intelligent man who did not resemble the frail body suspended by long jagged spikes, surrounded by flowers, opulence, and a pool of blood.
Ten days before his death, Koseda hit his head hard enough to need to be hospitalized, which is why he was discovered with hospital pajamas beneath his clothes. His death was officially ruled an accident, but there’s nothing accidental about the spikes he landed on or the devastating purpose that they serve.
As evidence of this, Koseda’s body is long gone, but the spikes that caused the fatality remain. They are a form of hostile or anti-homeless architecture. Cities all over the world promote the shameful practice of building uncomfortable elements into the infrastructure for the sole purpose of making homeless people suffer.
Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love and Homeless Hate
Come summer, intense heat permeates the urban landscape of Philadelphia, which stands out as a hub of anti-homeless architecture. Economists referred to it as a “construction boom” when billions of dollars were allocated to enhance the city’s infrastructure. The new urban scenery has been hailed as “accessible” and “innovative”, but all they’ve done is find new ways to make unsheltered people unable to sit down.
Take, for example, the Museum of Art, which is surrounded by benches that are separated by long metal bars. This isn’t so you’ll have a place to rest your arms. The benches are built this way so that homeless people will not be able to lie down on them.
This is what renowned urban planners did when they were gifted $500 million to undertake a massive revamp of the 173,000-square-foot space. They installed benches that make it hard for homeless people to take a nap. Sleep as you might, the same sort of infrastructure can be found in Rittenhouse Square, the Philadelphia airport, and Love Park, just to name a few locales.
Oddly enough, though, this wasn’t always so. Photographs from the not-so-distant past reveal a very different cityscape in Philly, one that is sans the bars, spikes, and curved metal benches. You don’t have to go back too far to find it. This photo, taken in 1961, depicts people enjoying the marvel of Rittenhouse Square, and all of the benches are uninterrupted.
Urban Heat Islands and Unshaded Green Lawns: The City’s True Message to Homeless Residents
Did you know that daytime temperatures can be as much as 7° higher in cities than in neighboring suburbs and towns? This is the result of a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, which projects that buildings, highways, and infrastructure unique to cities remit and absorb the sun‘s heat at higher rates.
Since most homeless people are concentrated in urban areas, they experience hot summers to an even higher degree. As a result, they are 200 times more likely to die of heat than housed people. Incidentally, medical professionals from Johns Hopkins Medicine suggest that if a person is at risk for heat stroke or dehydration, they should lie down in a cool space and elevate their legs. Urban planners intentionally created outdoor spaces where people can’t do that.
The city is sending a clear and alarming message to the homeless population and the housed population by prioritizing consumerism over public safety and health. Now, with the prospect of more anti-homeless architecture on the horizon and more laws that criminalize homelessness on the books, sweltering summers are bound to be hell for our unhoused neighbors.
The Harrowed History of Anti-Homeless Architecture
The spikes we see in cities to deter homeless people from resting in public spaces are not a new or novel concept. Alas, they are just an updated form of the same homeless hatred America has been exhibiting for centuries. We recently caught up with Dr. Owen Clayton, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln and author of “Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: the Literature and Culture of U.S Transiency,” to learn more about the foundation of these unjust structures.
“Hostile architecture dates from the early 1800s,” said Dr. Clayton. “In the US, it has well-known links to segregation, such as the famous Long Island Southern State Parkway, which in the 1920s was built with a series of low bridges that stopped buses (primarily used by people of colour) from going underneath but allowing cars (primarily used by white people) to travel freely.”
“Detroit has a long segregation wall that was built in the 1940s to divide its white and black neighbourhoods,” he continued. “In the 1960s and 70s, the modern version of hostile architecture was developed, known as Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, or CPTED. This aimed to control public spaces, and really the public itself, through what was sometimes known as ‘defensible space’.”
“The most important recent development is that since the 1980s, cities have been redesigned as spaces for pure consumerism,” Dr. Clayton said. “New York was the first city to brand itself as a marketable entity (think the ‘I love N.Y’ T-shirts and mugs with the Manhattan skyline), and this went along with aggressively moving out its unhoused population under Rudy Giuliani in the early 1990s. Cities across the world have followed suit, and so there, too, you find both police aggressively moving people on, plus a huge increase in the use of slated or locked benches, homeless spikes, segmented, tiered, and curved benches, sidewalk dividers, fenced or raised grate covers, large rocks placed under bridges, sprinklers, hostile music, etc.”
“It all comes down to the purpose of the contemporary city. Cities sell themselves to shoppers, and unhoused people ruin the shopping experience,” Dr. Clayton concluded. “Hostile architecture claims to protect the public. What is lost in all of this, of course, is that people experiencing homelessness are themselves also members of the public. Hostile architecture is inherently dehumanizing.”
Tell Your Legislators Affordable Housing Is a Truly Progressive Design for Cities
Urban planners are in a constant race to be portrayed as progressive, but making cities accessible should include affordable housing for all. Tell your legislators that the construction budget would be better spent by adding affordable housing to the backdrop of American cities. Doing so would mean we’d never have to spend that money on slanted benches or sidewalks lined with metal spikes.
