When the city of Toronto forcibly cleared a homeless encampment beneath a downtown section of Gardiner Expressway only to turn it over to a luxury outdoor restaurant pop-up, people paying $545 per party got prime views of unappetizing protests. “Dinner with a View” set up heated glass domes near the site of the former camp, offering a three-course meal prepared by Top Chef Canada winner René Rodriguez “in a highly unexpected setting.” Critics called it tone deaf at best, “obscene” and “dystopian” at worst. Why didn’t planners see this reaction coming?

This is revolting.

Emergency shelters are bursting at the seams and homeless people get evicted even from the OUTDOORS, all so the people who whine most about high taxes can eat *ONE* meal that costs more than a single month's rent. #topoli #raisetaxes
https://t.co/rB1uCH66wN

— Kelly Thomas (@kelwinds) April 2, 2019

In a statement, Dinner with a View stressed that their installation is located about a mile east of the dismantled homeless camp, saying “we are sympathetic to those impacted by the City’s actions and were in no way involved with the decision making process [to evict the camp.] No encampments were removed to make way for Dinner With A View.”

That didn’t stop organizers with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) from planning their own three-course meals right next to the installation, in full view of the domes, which were prepared by volunteers and served for free. Noting the “brazenness” of the city’s decision to house a luxury dining pop-up under the very same highway as the evicted camp, they called it “Dinner With a View – of the Rich.”

The conflict plays into a larger conversation around urban renewal, gentrification and the social and economic inequality that leads to homelessness in the first place. When we talk about “reclaiming public spaces,” particularly underpasses and other areas that are often occupied by people who have nowhere else to go, are we thinking enough about who’s being displaced by these projects, or what kind of domino effect they might have on the affordability of the neighborhood? When we say these areas are “disused,” what do we mean by that?

Historically, “urban renewal” has often been code for racist practices like redlining, the discriminatory displacement of black people from certain neighborhoods. Displaced people weren’t always compensated, and entire communities were razed as cities used federal money to make way for wealthier (and whiter) developments, often worsening poverty and overcrowding. The impacts of these practices are documented by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond on a website called Renewing Inequality. Today, the neighborhoods those displaced people moved into back in the ‘50s and ‘60s are frequent targets of new “urban renewal” projects, continuing the cycle.

The “reclamation” of urban spaces is often a euphemism for “cleaning up” areas where the full impact of poverty is on display, making something many of us would rather not think about impossible to ignore. In cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where the sky high cost of living and lack of adequate public services produces higher than average rates of homelessness, encampments are everywhere because people simply have nowhere else to go.

City policies that criminalize homelessness (like panhandling bans and laws against urban camping) jail people for minor offenses, making it even harder for unhoused people to gain access to affordable housing, employment and health care. Plus, public restrooms are often intentionally hard to find in cities thanks to fears that unhoused people will use them, while those same people are vilified for fulfilling a basic human need in the streets.

This is often where “hostile urbanism” comes in. Benches are designed to prevent people from getting comfortable, spikes are set into concrete beneath overpasses and sidewalks are broken up by posts and planters to disallow tents. It’s as if the people who demand and design these features think they can humiliate and terrorize unhoused people, poor people and addicts out of existence. A humane solution that wouldn’t “litter” our public spaces or force us to confront evidence of extreme inequality is actually a lot more simple: ensure that people’s basic human needs are met. Those of us who create, use and enjoy urban spaces can start by making sure new projects popping up in our neighborhoods are inclusive to every member of society.

Just as design can produce objects and structures that are intentionally hostile, it can be a powerful tool for good. It’s one thing to rehabilitate a polluted industrial site or push a city to open up urban areas that have been fenced off to prevent “undesirable activity,” and then create something the entire population of the city can enjoy. Vacant lots that developers hold hostage and liminal spaces that perhaps shouldn’t exist in the first place – like the spaces beneath noisy, polluting elevated highways – can and arguably should be subverted, whether via official or guerrilla means. But when we plan and support such projects, we should consider who might be negatively affected and how we can mitigate that harm. That might require confronting our own discomfort with poverty and inequality, and the ways in which we dehumanize other people without even realizing it. It also requires taking action.

One example of what this can look like is Montreal’s plan to address homelessness, which includes a philosophy of “social inclusion” along with housing and job assistance. The plan points out that homeless people are members of the larger community, and includes strategies and activities that invite participation in the fabric of the city. It’s not perfect, and some critics say it’s still undermined by criminalization and racism, but it’s a step in the right direction. “Community-first” projects that provide housing, support and social inclusion go a long way as well.

Not every misguided “urban revitalization” project carries such overt symbols of wealth and privilege displacing the poor as Toronto’s Dinner with a View, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a similar impact.

Top image via Dinner with a View

With the age of big box stores waning, all those massive abandoned retail facilities could be transformed almost instantly into housing for the homeless using a variety of plug-and-play prefab elements. The research and development studio at KTGY Architecture + Planning in Los Angeles considers what we seem to need space for the most in cities – housing people who tend to fall through the cracks as the cost of living continues to increase – and builds entire complexes of supportive spaces and services within the empty shells of stores like Sears and JCPenney.

“Re-Habit” doesn’t get rid of retail altogether. It just makes the shopping portions of each building smaller, and places bedroom pods, restrooms, kitchens, dining halls, offices, job training rooms and other spaces behind them. Each Re-Habit store would be a community-supported thrift boutique benefiting the transitional housing program.

The main goal of the project is to be self-supporting, the creators explain, by providing training, employment and housing for residents, who rotate chores like working in the kitchen or keeping the dining hall clean. The large, flat roofs of big box stores are ideal for rooftop gardening, recreation and solar panels, and many have outdoor plaza areas that could accommodate small pop-up shops and food carts.

To demonstrate how it could work, KTGY used a typical 86,000-square-foot store (which would often be an “anchor store” in a shopping plaza) and created illustrations showing how it could be used. The firm designed modular led pot units that contain anywhere from 2 to 20 beds, easily slotting into the large, empty spaces. Additionally, the space could support 8 individual apartment units on an upper floor.

“From 2016 to 2017, the homeless population in the U.S. increased for the first time in seven years, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the U.S., 553,742 people were homeless in 2017. Housing programs are a meaningful contribution to addressing the homelessness crisis.”

“Living without a home not only endangers individuals’ health and safety, but is also a significant barrier to obtaining and keeping a means of employment. Shelter is a necessity for all, and providing housing is one way to ease suffering and support individuals seeking to break a cycle of poverty.”

It’s not just you – that bench in your city is designed to be uncomfortable on purpose. Armed with a loose definition of what it means to ‘loiter,’ intentionally hostile and sometimes downright sadistic urban design prioritizes separating ‘undesirables’ from city residents deemed more deserving. But these designs aren’t just inhumane – they have a negative practical and psychological effect on virtually everyone who spends time in public spaces. Can you imagine how different our cities could feel if they welcomed us, made us comfortable, asked us to stay a while and treated us like we actually live here?

Benches That Prevent Laying Down

The Camden Bench hates you. Seriously. It isn’t just a vaguely Brutalist block of concrete with a surface faceted for the sake of aesthetics. It’s the public furniture equivalent of a finger wagging in your face. Commissioned by the Camden London Borough Council and installed in 2012, it boasts of its ability to deter a grand total of 22 behaviors, including sleeping, skateboarding, canoodling, drug dealing (what?), littering, graffiti and theft. Its solidity makes it too heavy to move, its angles make it uncomfortable, it has no crevices and it’s coated in a waterproof anti-paint coating.

In a masterful stroke of smirking condescension, its manufacturer, UK-based Factory Furniture, calls it “a more inclusive place to sit,” noting that its indentations are at different heights. Sure. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and skateboarders have already proven the marketing materials wrong, as seen in a video at The Guardian.

But other bench designs simply insert armrests and other objects, ostensibly to ‘separate the seats.’ We all know what they’re really for – preventing anyone from laying down. Cities criminalize homelessness and ghettoize low-income residents in an attempt to conceal poverty under the guise of making public areas cleaner and safer while the machinery that creates these social and economic conditions in the first place churns away. Furthermore, these designs don’t distinguish between houseless people and other city residents who might be ill, disabled, pregnant, elderly or just tired after a long bike ride. So who are they for?

The Archisuit by artist Sarah Ross is one example of ways in which city residents fight back against these measures. “Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.”

(images via Wikimedia Commons, Factory Furniture, Flickr Creative Commons, Sarah Ross)

Public Seating ‘Alternatives’

If you’re a small person, you might be able to rest a single butt cheek on the wooden oval stools at Montreal’s Laurier Station. If you’re not, the most these ‘seats’ can offer you is a momentary place to sort of awkwardly lean against the wall. In Tokyo, a tubular stainless steel bench that gets dangerously hot in summer and freezing in the winter certainly won’t let you settle in for long. Some parks have installed giant boulders in place of benches – good luck taking a nap on one of those.

A book called Unpleasant Design by Selena Savic and Gordan Savicic chronicles all of these awkward seats and other ways in which public spaces are made intentionally uncomfortable, modified to deter certain activities or otherwise created to manipulate us. Examples they’ve gathered include decorative ‘picket fences’ around public landscaping that are really spikes, boulders placed beneath highway overpasses, trash cans with tiny openings and even benches with studs built right into the seat that only retract for a short period if you insert some coins into a slot. The latter started as a satirical joke by sculptor Fabian Brunsing, but Chinese officials didn’t see the humor, copying the design in Shandong’s Yantai Park.

(images via Wikimedia Commons, MTL Blog, Yumiko Hayakawa, Unpleasant Design)

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Hostile Urbanism 22 Intentionally Inhospitable Examples Of Defensive Design

The problem of homelessness is a complex one rooted in gross stratification of wealth, and while addressing it in full means addressing poverty itself, temporary portable housing can save lives in the meantime. Many cities are implementing transitional housing programs that make use of inexpensive, easy to move structures in interstitial urban spaces. The Martin Architecture and Design Workshop (MADWORKSHOP) teamed up with students from the University of Southern California School of Architecture (USC) to come up with some creative examples of these structures.

‘The Homeless Studio’ is an organization aiming to address LA’s homelessness crisis through design. Students built a series of full-scale, inhabitable nomadic shelters ranging from contraptions that fit onto shopping carts to more comfortable structures that wouldn’t be out of place in a tiny house village. Most of the materials were scavenged from around Los Angeles, and the designs had to be collapsible and suitable for a variety of locations.

The results are sometimes more artistic than they are practical – like a hut clad in retail mannequin displays – but in many cases, the interiors are cozy and well-lit by windows and skylights, and one design even has a roof deck.

The aim of actually addressing homelessness didn’t just consist of building a few weird-looking structures and calling it a day. The students worked with city officials, local agencies, artist and activists to come up with a holistic solution in a city where nearly 47,000 people live on the streets. They’re making repeated visits to local agencies like the Skid Row Housing Trust and the Downtown Women’s Center, speaking to people experiencing homelessness to get firsthand information about their needs.

They’ll also be taking the hands-on skills and knowledge they gained through this project and applying it to a larger solution, designing a 30-bed modular shelter for women for Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission in San Fernando Valley. Their efforts over the course will be documented and compiled into a publication set for publishing by the USC School of Architecture in 2017.

Could tiny prefabricated stackable mobile housing units help solve homelessness in cities like San Francisco, where nearly 7,000 people sleep in the streets every night? Affordable housing has all but disappeared in the Bay Area, pushing thousands of people out and giving many people nowhere to go. While most developers in San Francisco are busy working on building the kinds of expensive condos that exacerbate the problem, one is offering a potential solution in the form of minimalist pods.

Patrick Kennedy and his team at real estate development and rental company Panoramic Interests present the MicroPAD, a self-contained, 160-square-foot mobile home that can stand alone or be stacked into a complex of up to 300 units. Nine-foot ceilings and generous windows flood the interiors with natural light, and each home contains a bed with storage drawers, a modest kitchenette, armoire closet, desk with chair and shelves, and a bathroom with a toilet and shower.

The units can be manufactured in about a week, exceed California seismic code, are made of non-combustible materials and feature engineered soundproofing and 24/7 filtered ventilation. Ultimately, aside from the size, the MicroPAD offers better quality housing than the more conventional apartments for which many of the city’s residents already pay lots of cash. The size and stickability is a response to the eye-watering $1,200-per-square-foot cost of development within the cramped city – it’s quick and easy to build, and doesn’t take up a lot of space.

Using prefab materials shaves 40% off the cost of conventional construction, and the developers note that the units can be built on, or in the airspaces above, unused and underutilized city-owned lots to further cut costs. At a cost of $1,000 per unit per month, the MicroPAD would come in at well under the average $17,353 currently spent per year on each homeless person in other forms of supportive housing. Panoramic Interests has a bunch of proposals on their site showing how and where the units could be stacked into 33-unit or 300-unit buildings.

Clearly, a lot of thought has been put into this proposal, and the company has already produced a number of prototypes to demonstrate exactly how the units work – one is placed outside Kennedy’s office on Ninth and Mission, a neighborhood with a significant population of homeless people. Of course, in a city where anyone who isn’t a tech worker struggles to get by, this concept could and should be scaled up to offer affordable housing for all.