Hostile Architecture

Definition

Hostile architecture names the design repertoire that uses built form — usually at the city's edges — to repel unwanted bodies and uses. In this wiki the concept is anchored in Iain Borden's 1996 account of London's "edge-hardenings": "Many similar edge-hardenings have begun to sprout up around London, where spiked windowsills, 'decorative' railings, studded flower-planters and night-time automatic sprinkler systems to 'clean' shop and office doorways are being used to repel the public from the edge of the street." The canonical case is the Holy Trinity blue screen's geometry: a low wall "of the right depth and height to sit and, potentially, to sleep upon" is neutralised by the screen's "sudden 45 degrees deviation… leaving only 150 millimetres clear in front," so that "through the precise control of screen and wall in relation to the thickness of the human body, the low wall becomes too shallow for a person to sleep upon, or to sit upon for any length of time." Hostile design is thus computable from the body: the hostile edge is one whose inhabitable depth has been engineered below the body's thickness.

Three features distinguish the concept in Borden's treatment. (1) It is quiet: the screen "hides – metaphorically and literally – its own concerns," and the devices wear camouflage ('decorative' railings, planters, cleaning systems). (2) It targets the edge: not the interior of space but the "thick edge" (thick-edge) where sitting, sleeping, stopping, lingering happen — and it also discourages the 'respectable' pedestrian, since the screen's smooth tactility leaves "no occasion to linger, observe or inspect." (3) It is materially legible: hostile design is a fact of plan and section — the 150 mm clearance, the spike, the deviation — before it is a fact of policy. The contemporary term "hostile architecture" (also "defensive" or "unpleasant design") post-dates Borden's "edge-hardenings"; his text is the concept's early, precise articulation. Related but distinct: privatised-public-space is the territory such devices police, and "defensible space" (Oscar Newman's term, invoked in the source for the homeless' own appropriations) is its inversion — the claim of territory by occupants (see log).

Key Thinkers

• Iain Borden — the concept's anchor: the taxonomy of edge-hardenings and the 45°/150 mm geometry of exclusion.
• Georg Simmel — the (negative) ground: boundaries are formed between social elements — hostile design is the attempt to make a boundary act without relation, which Borden shows reductively fails (the screen is still a spectacle, still a social relation).
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the sensorial criterion: what hostile edges subtract is "exactly that tactility which Maurice Merleau-Ponty reasserted against the domination of vision."
• Guy Debord — the screen's double: even the hostile barrier "is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" — exclusion cannot abolish relation.

Related Concepts

• thick-edge — the zone hostile design operates on: inhabitable depth engineered to uninhabitability.
• boundaries — the parent concept: the hostile edge as boundary "of exclusion, a brutally frontal relation."
• privatised-public-space — the territory: Broadgate's escorted "undesirables" are the managerial twin of the spiked sill.
• appropriation — what hostile design pre-empts: sitting, sleeping, claiming — the homeless' "illegal real estate" against the screen.
• embodiment — the design parameter: the body's thickness as the measure of exclusion; tactility as the sense subtracted.
• enclosure — the political technique: "clear blue water between spaces and peoples."
• spectacle — the barrier's irreducible sociality: the blue screen as spectacle, "not a collection of images."
• right-to-the-city — the normative counter-frame: who may rest in the city is a right-of-the-city question.
• neoliberal-metropolis — the wider condition in which edge-hardening "sprout[s] up."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the founding source: the edge-hardening taxonomy ("spiked windowsills, 'decorative' railings, studded flower-planters and night-time automatic sprinkler systems," p. 51), the 45° deviation and 150 mm clearance (p. 51), the subtracted tactility (p. 51), and the screen as hidden concern ("hides – metaphorically and literally – its own concerns," p. 51).
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the concept's Los Angeles prehistory and its fuller taxonomy: Davis's "Sadistic Street Environments" — "barrel-shaped or in some cases metal-spiked benches make sleeping impossible and even sitting uncomfortable; sprinkler systems installed in a local park go on randomly through the night"; restaurants protecting "refuse bins in 'ornate enclosures' and 'bag-lady proof trash cages' topped with spikes or razor wire"; the "toilettless no-man's-land" (p. 304); Toy Town's warehouses "with water sprinkling systems at the entrances which work only at night, to prevent the homeless from finding a dry niche to sleep" — while deliberately retaining the homeless as cheap labor at loading peaks (p. 254); and Flusty's "prickly" mode ("difficult or uncomfortable to occupy because of sprinkler systems, bum-proof resting surfaces, and other repellent design features") within the five-mode interdictory-space taxonomy (see interdictory-space) — the design detail-level of Davis's "urban cold war" to "make public facilities and spaces as 'unliveable' as possible for the homeless and the poor" (p. 304). The 1996 Borden account and the 1994 Flusty account are thus independent, near-synchronous articulations of one design repertoire.
• source-notes/solomon-2018-public-spheres-hong-kong

Open Questions

• Can hostile design always be audited in drawing — is the 45° deviation a generalisable method (body-thickness as a reviewable parameter), or is hostility often deniable in section?
• Borden notes the devices also repel the 'respectable' pedestrian. Is hostile architecture always over-inclusive in practice — and is that self-defeating or part of its function (the generalised moving-along)?
• How does the concept relate to "defensible space" (Newman): defensible space claims territory for occupants; edge-hardening denies territory to them. Are they two phases of one territorial logic?
• Is there a hospitable counter-design at the same scale of detail — the sitable wall (150 mm of welcome rather than exclusion) — and can it survive the ownership regime that installed the screen?