14 ms·

Hostile Architecture

104 points by eplanit 7y ago

zxcvbn4038 7y ago
LaGuardia airport blasts you with a loud piercing noise if you sit on the toilets - an obvious move to keep people from lingering too long. But I’m stubborn and I really had to go, so I can tell you from experience the noise shuts off after a few minutes - I either made it overheat or I was sitting so still the sensor thought the stall was empty.
- twic 7y ago
  They should tune it to the brown note, that'd help keep things moving efficiently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
  - zxcvbn4038 7y ago
    If the brown note was real it would probably be abused to death. High school kids would drive down the road blasting it on their speakers. Debt collectors would play it over the phone to embarrass people. YouTube people would be wiring people’s door bells to play it as pranks. CIA would lock people in ceramic rooms and play it for hours as torture. DARPA would spend a billion dollars developing an anti-brown note and weaponize constipation.
the_arun 7y ago
Aren’t skateboard deterrents example of this?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Sure, for skateboarders.
- dymk 7y ago
  That's an example in the linked article, so yes
- afarrell 7y ago
  If skateboard deterrents refers to the nubs which are put on the railings for stairs, I'd say those come with more an ethos of, "This object is for the public to walk up stairs more safely. You will not use it as a ramp-bar. That both makes it unusable for anyone while you are doing that and also causes it to break down from friction more quickly." Since there isn't really a fundamental human need to slide a skateboard down a handrail, I don't think it really counts as "hostile". It just represents, "I've agreed to provide a certain level of maintenance for this public handrail. Not enough to handle repeated skateboard friction."
jdavis703 7y ago
Architecture becomes hostile when the design doesn't guide users to a better alternative. It's fine to create a pee-deflecting wall, but there better be a public bathroom nearby. Likewise it's fine to reserve some benches for people who want to sit at the bus stop, but there should be some spaces nearby for people who want to recline also.
- egdod 7y ago
  > It's fine to create a pee-deflecting wall, but there better be a public bathroom nrearby I’d say it’s perfectly fine for a private builder to arrange things such that people are discouraged from peeing on his building. There’s no moral requirement to provide public restrooms.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Morality is irrelevant here. Expecting people to "just hold it" indefinitely is simply unrealistic. It may not be the responsibility of a private builder, but private builders operate in a larger social and regulatory landscape. Society as a whole needs to come up with reasonable rules that people are capable of complying with. Doing otherwise creates a broken system that goes very bad places. When I was growing up, peeing in the shrubs (or on a wall or wooden fence) was fairly common, especially for men. If you want to ban that, then you need to provide enough public restrooms to make it a reasonable expectation to use the appropriate facilities.
    - dymk 7y ago
      In the US, Starbucks seems to have stepped up and decided to be a publicly accessible restroom for anybody who wants to use them
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        True, but only after a PR debacle in which two black men were arrested for waiting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia to meet someone. One of them asked to use the bathroom while waiting and an employee called the cops, who hauled them off to jail in spite of the white guy they were meeting showing up and talking to the cops to say "No, they really were waiting for me. That's the truth." To save face, Starbucks apologized and made it company-wide policy that anyone can use their bathrooms, an announcement that got posted to r/homeless as a little good news for the homeless community. https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=starbucks+two+black+men https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=starbuck...
dugditches 7y ago
Lots of major cities are dealing with growing Homeless populations. Stuff like this just seems like a gross bandaid https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/03/article-0-13E72117000005DC-269_964x640.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/03/article-0-13E7211...
- masklinn 7y ago
  Holy shit, the bolt-studded steps in the wiki page were already gross, but putting "anti-homeless" dragon's teeth under bridges and overpasses steps way over it and into "abusively horrendous".
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Sometimes, locals decide to respond to the installation of hostile architecture by "killing it with kindness," such as covering anti homeless spikes with pillows and cushions. Here is one such article: https://archive.attn.com/stories/14655/manchester-england-residents-throw-pillows-hostile-architecture https://archive.attn.com/stories/14655/manchester-england-re... I think most hostile architecture is basically an admission that "We don't actually have a solution to our social problems, so we are resorting to a beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves model as an outward expression of our incompetence." That's my charitable take. My uncharitable take is that a lot of people in power don't care, have no heart and can't be arsed to pretend to care.
- creato 7y ago
  > That's my charitable take. My uncharitable take is that a lot of people in power don't care, have no heart and can't be arsed to pretend to care. The charitable take is that public space is meant to be usable by the general public, not have it adversely possessed as permanent living space. Most "hostile architecture" is designed to prevent only the latter, not the former.
  - throwaway3627 7y ago
    Nice empathy you have there. I bet you would sing a different song if you were homeless.
    - Chris2048 7y ago
      Would you sing a different song if you weren't a throwaway?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    The general public doesn't hang out in a lot of the places where they put spikes to interfere with homeless people being able to sleep, like under overpasses. We're not talking "You shouldn't sleep in the public square." We're talking "You shouldn't sleep at all. You shouldn't exist. No, we aren't really going to help you solve your problems and get off the street. We are just going to make your existence as miserable as possible while you are homeless and make it that much harder for you to solve your own problems." At best, making it impossible for homeless people to sleep at all "solves" homelessness by sending people to an early grave. If that isn't cruel and heartless, I don't know what is.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sandij 7y ago
Any experiences with intentionally hostile software architecture? Curious how for example code project structure or inter-process messaging constraints can prohibit mixing concerns or breaking the domain model. Also curious how such a forceful environment is experienced and whether it has the intended effect.
- batoure 7y ago
  I came to the comments to talk about this, was totally hoping to scroll down and find a section about software in the wikipedia article. I would argue that almost every project I have every worked on where the software was initially maintained by a single individual would be classified as "hostile architecture"
- unhammer 7y ago
  Well, there are hostile user interfaces at least: https://userinyerface.com/ https://userinyerface.com/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/ and in programming you have defensive/deterrent features like prefixing unsafe function names with "unsafe"
- twic 7y ago
  Microservices advocates claim that the pain of implementing features across microservices encourages modularity.
- Thiez 7y ago
  Perhaps GCC qualifies? https://lwn.net/Articles/583140/ https://lwn.net/Articles/583140/
- nukeop 7y ago
  Microsoft Office is built on such model, where the document specification is intentionally vague, contradictory, and the implementation is full of constantly changing details that make 100% accurate re-implementation by competition impossible, thus maintaining its hegemony in the office software niche.
quickthrower2 7y ago
By that definition (esp. with urinal example), I'd include: locks, steps and fences. All have the effect of stopping some people doing what they wanted.
gtirloni 7y ago
Hostile architecture is usually focused on the local/micro, the area of influence of the builder/owner. Solving the actual problems in society that lead to hostile architecture is a harder problem and the builder doesn't have complete control of that. A builder can choose to donate to a charity that assists the homeless but that doesn't mean people will stop peeing in their property. Does anyone know of an organization that could collect money from lots of builders/owners, apply some root cause analysis and try to solve the real problems so private owners don't need to resort to hostile architecture? Preferably a public one.
- atoav 7y ago
  While it might be rational from a owner’s standpoint, their buildings usually have a public part (e.g. because it is directly accessible from the street) and my gut feeling is, that you should own up to it. I know that many like their brutalist concrete surfaces clean, but ultimately your building stands in the public with public roads connecting to it and a public walking by and you have at least some moral responsibility to also serve that public if it doesn’t kill you. If you wan’t to avoid people peeing everywhere, lobby for public toiletts. Real estate owners are typically really good at that kind of lobbying, typically it is always for thwir own good and never for the public good.
dang 7y ago
Related threads from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040313 I feel like there was a discussion about this quite recently, too, but can't find it.
t0astbread 7y ago
Maybe a pointless comment but this very article was linked in another post[1] that was trending a few hours ago. Could it be that this post was made while browsing Wikipedia from that other post? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619947
PinkMilkshake 7y ago
Hostile architecture is fundamentally sick. To take public space and purposely make it hostile to the human body is just so abhorrent, I don't understand how it isn't illegal everywhere. There's something about it that really gets to me. It's just so twisted at such a deep level that it feels like it is (or borderlines on) a human rights violation.
- wahern 7y ago
  I take it you've never been to a playground taken over by the homeless and drug addicts? Had to wash down the the sidewalk at 5AM in the morning so people don't step in filth walking into the office or store? I don't see anything wrong with hostile architecture, per se. What's wrong is hostile architecture in the absence of shelters and housing programs. But the solution isn't giving over playgrounds and store fronts, but to provide housing. And as someone who has lived in multiple large cities, I've seen firsthand (as an observer, as an acquaintance) a not insubstantial fraction of homeless will simply refuse assistance, whether because of mental problems or drug addiction. So the presence of hostile architecture doesn't necessarily mean shelter doesn't exist, it simply reflects other societal ills.
  - PinkMilkshake 7y ago
    It's not just about the homeless, although they are the most affected. The very idea of it is horrible. We are slowly turning our cities into giant torture champers where it's uncomfortable to sit, uncomfortable to stand, uncomfortable to lie down. Everything is covered in nubs and spikes and built at angles that force you to expend energy. You can't ever relax. It's like this new breed of shopping malls that have no clocks, no rubbish bins, no benches and no water fountains. You either have to be shopping or leaving. Eventually the only comfy place left will be at home.
    - wahern 7y ago
      Because these things are abused. Simply providing them doesn't solve the problem--we'll just have really disgusting facilities that few people, if anybody, uses. I don't know how to solve the problem. But railing against the symptoms doesn't help. Filthy public spaces are worse than no public spaces, and no public spaces is precisely what we'll get if we try to address the symptoms without addressing the underlying causes. Parks disappear, buildings are built without public spaces entirely or with "public spaces" inside buildings where security patrol and which become inaccessible after hours, etc.
jxramos 7y ago
This fella went all out with a challenge accepted attitude... the fakir's rest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3M7FxJqtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3M7FxJqtM
jotm 7y ago
Bus stops in the UK are terrible because of this. I could never sit on them, in fact I would stand outside unless it's raining.

104 points by eplanit 7y ago

LaGuardia airport blasts you with a loud piercing noise if you sit on the toilets - an obvious move to keep people from lingering too long. But I’m stubborn and I really had to go, so I can tell you from experience the noise shuts off after a few minutes - I either made it overheat or I was sitting so still the sensor thought the stall was empty.

twic 7y ago
They should tune it to the brown note, that'd help keep things moving efficiently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
- zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  If the brown note was real it would probably be abused to death. High school kids would drive down the road blasting it on their speakers. Debt collectors would play it over the phone to embarrass people. YouTube people would be wiring people’s door bells to play it as pranks. CIA would lock people in ceramic rooms and play it for hours as torture. DARPA would spend a billion dollars developing an anti-brown note and weaponize constipation.

the_arun 7y ago

Aren’t skateboard deterrents example of this?

saagarjha 7y ago
Sure, for skateboarders.
dymk 7y ago
That's an example in the linked article, so yes
afarrell 7y ago
If skateboard deterrents refers to the nubs which are put on the railings for stairs, I'd say those come with more an ethos of, "This object is for the public to walk up stairs more safely. You will not use it as a ramp-bar. That both makes it unusable for anyone while you are doing that and also causes it to break down from friction more quickly." Since there isn't really a fundamental human need to slide a skateboard down a handrail, I don't think it really counts as "hostile". It just represents, "I've agreed to provide a certain level of maintenance for this public handrail. Not enough to handle repeated skateboard friction."

jdavis703 7y ago

Architecture becomes hostile when the design doesn't guide users to a better alternative. It's fine to create a pee-deflecting wall, but there better be a public bathroom nearby. Likewise it's fine to reserve some benches for people who want to sit at the bus stop, but there should be some spaces nearby for people who want to recline also.

egdod 7y ago
> It's fine to create a pee-deflecting wall, but there better be a public bathroom nrearby I’d say it’s perfectly fine for a private builder to arrange things such that people are discouraged from peeing on his building. There’s no moral requirement to provide public restrooms.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Morality is irrelevant here. Expecting people to "just hold it" indefinitely is simply unrealistic. It may not be the responsibility of a private builder, but private builders operate in a larger social and regulatory landscape. Society as a whole needs to come up with reasonable rules that people are capable of complying with. Doing otherwise creates a broken system that goes very bad places. When I was growing up, peeing in the shrubs (or on a wall or wooden fence) was fairly common, especially for men. If you want to ban that, then you need to provide enough public restrooms to make it a reasonable expectation to use the appropriate facilities.
  - dymk 7y ago
    In the US, Starbucks seems to have stepped up and decided to be a publicly accessible restroom for anybody who wants to use them
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      True, but only after a PR debacle in which two black men were arrested for waiting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia to meet someone. One of them asked to use the bathroom while waiting and an employee called the cops, who hauled them off to jail in spite of the white guy they were meeting showing up and talking to the cops to say "No, they really were waiting for me. That's the truth." To save face, Starbucks apologized and made it company-wide policy that anyone can use their bathrooms, an announcement that got posted to r/homeless as a little good news for the homeless community. https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=starbucks+two+black+men https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=starbuck...

dugditches 7y ago

Lots of major cities are dealing with growing Homeless populations. Stuff like this just seems like a gross bandaid https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/03/article-0-13E72117000005DC-269_964x640.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/03/article-0-13E7211...

masklinn 7y ago
Holy shit, the bolt-studded steps in the wiki page were already gross, but putting "anti-homeless" dragon's teeth under bridges and overpasses steps way over it and into "abusively horrendous".

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Sometimes, locals decide to respond to the installation of hostile architecture by "killing it with kindness," such as covering anti homeless spikes with pillows and cushions. Here is one such article: https://archive.attn.com/stories/14655/manchester-england-residents-throw-pillows-hostile-architecture https://archive.attn.com/stories/14655/manchester-england-re... I think most hostile architecture is basically an admission that "We don't actually have a solution to our social problems, so we are resorting to a beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves model as an outward expression of our incompetence." That's my charitable take. My uncharitable take is that a lot of people in power don't care, have no heart and can't be arsed to pretend to care.

creato 7y ago
> That's my charitable take. My uncharitable take is that a lot of people in power don't care, have no heart and can't be arsed to pretend to care. The charitable take is that public space is meant to be usable by the general public, not have it adversely possessed as permanent living space. Most "hostile architecture" is designed to prevent only the latter, not the former.
- throwaway3627 7y ago
  Nice empathy you have there. I bet you would sing a different song if you were homeless.
  - Chris2048 7y ago
    Would you sing a different song if you weren't a throwaway?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  The general public doesn't hang out in a lot of the places where they put spikes to interfere with homeless people being able to sleep, like under overpasses. We're not talking "You shouldn't sleep in the public square." We're talking "You shouldn't sleep at all. You shouldn't exist. No, we aren't really going to help you solve your problems and get off the street. We are just going to make your existence as miserable as possible while you are homeless and make it that much harder for you to solve your own problems." At best, making it impossible for homeless people to sleep at all "solves" homelessness by sending people to an early grave. If that isn't cruel and heartless, I don't know what is.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sandij 7y ago

Any experiences with intentionally hostile software architecture? Curious how for example code project structure or inter-process messaging constraints can prohibit mixing concerns or breaking the domain model. Also curious how such a forceful environment is experienced and whether it has the intended effect.

batoure 7y ago
I came to the comments to talk about this, was totally hoping to scroll down and find a section about software in the wikipedia article. I would argue that almost every project I have every worked on where the software was initially maintained by a single individual would be classified as "hostile architecture"
unhammer 7y ago
Well, there are hostile user interfaces at least: https://userinyerface.com/ https://userinyerface.com/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/ and in programming you have defensive/deterrent features like prefixing unsafe function names with "unsafe"
twic 7y ago
Microservices advocates claim that the pain of implementing features across microservices encourages modularity.
Thiez 7y ago
Perhaps GCC qualifies? https://lwn.net/Articles/583140/ https://lwn.net/Articles/583140/
nukeop 7y ago
Microsoft Office is built on such model, where the document specification is intentionally vague, contradictory, and the implementation is full of constantly changing details that make 100% accurate re-implementation by competition impossible, thus maintaining its hegemony in the office software niche.

quickthrower2 7y ago

By that definition (esp. with urinal example), I'd include: locks, steps and fences. All have the effect of stopping some people doing what they wanted.

gtirloni 7y ago

Hostile architecture is usually focused on the local/micro, the area of influence of the builder/owner. Solving the actual problems in society that lead to hostile architecture is a harder problem and the builder doesn't have complete control of that. A builder can choose to donate to a charity that assists the homeless but that doesn't mean people will stop peeing in their property. Does anyone know of an organization that could collect money from lots of builders/owners, apply some root cause analysis and try to solve the real problems so private owners don't need to resort to hostile architecture? Preferably a public one.

atoav 7y ago
While it might be rational from a owner’s standpoint, their buildings usually have a public part (e.g. because it is directly accessible from the street) and my gut feeling is, that you should own up to it. I know that many like their brutalist concrete surfaces clean, but ultimately your building stands in the public with public roads connecting to it and a public walking by and you have at least some moral responsibility to also serve that public if it doesn’t kill you. If you wan’t to avoid people peeing everywhere, lobby for public toiletts. Real estate owners are typically really good at that kind of lobbying, typically it is always for thwir own good and never for the public good.

dang 7y ago

Related threads from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12041639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13040313 I feel like there was a discussion about this quite recently, too, but can't find it.

t0astbread 7y ago

Maybe a pointless comment but this very article was linked in another post[1] that was trending a few hours ago. Could it be that this post was made while browsing Wikipedia from that other post? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20619947

PinkMilkshake 7y ago

Hostile architecture is fundamentally sick. To take public space and purposely make it hostile to the human body is just so abhorrent, I don't understand how it isn't illegal everywhere. There's something about it that really gets to me. It's just so twisted at such a deep level that it feels like it is (or borderlines on) a human rights violation.

wahern 7y ago
I take it you've never been to a playground taken over by the homeless and drug addicts? Had to wash down the the sidewalk at 5AM in the morning so people don't step in filth walking into the office or store? I don't see anything wrong with hostile architecture, per se. What's wrong is hostile architecture in the absence of shelters and housing programs. But the solution isn't giving over playgrounds and store fronts, but to provide housing. And as someone who has lived in multiple large cities, I've seen firsthand (as an observer, as an acquaintance) a not insubstantial fraction of homeless will simply refuse assistance, whether because of mental problems or drug addiction. So the presence of hostile architecture doesn't necessarily mean shelter doesn't exist, it simply reflects other societal ills.
- PinkMilkshake 7y ago
  It's not just about the homeless, although they are the most affected. The very idea of it is horrible. We are slowly turning our cities into giant torture champers where it's uncomfortable to sit, uncomfortable to stand, uncomfortable to lie down. Everything is covered in nubs and spikes and built at angles that force you to expend energy. You can't ever relax. It's like this new breed of shopping malls that have no clocks, no rubbish bins, no benches and no water fountains. You either have to be shopping or leaving. Eventually the only comfy place left will be at home.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Because these things are abused. Simply providing them doesn't solve the problem--we'll just have really disgusting facilities that few people, if anybody, uses. I don't know how to solve the problem. But railing against the symptoms doesn't help. Filthy public spaces are worse than no public spaces, and no public spaces is precisely what we'll get if we try to address the symptoms without addressing the underlying causes. Parks disappear, buildings are built without public spaces entirely or with "public spaces" inside buildings where security patrol and which become inaccessible after hours, etc.

jxramos 7y ago

This fella went all out with a challenge accepted attitude... the fakir's rest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3M7FxJqtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3M7FxJqtM

jotm 7y ago

Bus stops in the UK are terrible because of this. I could never sit on them, in fact I would stand outside unless it's raining.