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Hostile architecture reinforces hostility
(files.mastodon.social)
transcript [text overlaid on several pictures of benches and outside windowsills. the benches have bars, or gaps to prevent someone from sleeping on them.
text reads "Ban anti-homeless arctithecture"]
sauce: https://mastodon.social/@AnarchistArt/112901196516297447
Hostile architecture is among the symptoms of the hostile modern city, where neighbours never say hi, and people die on the streets as people walk passivly by.
This seems a bit oversimplified. Yes the homeless need a place, and that place should be built and funded. But at least in most of the places I've lived there are certain bus stops and parks that are not usable as they are full of homeless and addicts sleeping on all the benches and leaving needles all over (putting these together because this close to methodone clinics many homeless are addicts). It's unsafe for children (or adults for that matter) to use the parks, nobody can sit at the bus stops and at some stops there's such a crowd of homeless that people generally avoid them altogether. Would these measures from the picture help? No chance, because the anti homeless benches they've built are too small for the pregnant and too uncomfortable for injured and elderly so they've made it useless to everyone. I'm sure there's a reasonable solution where everyone wins, and I'm sure I'll never see it
Certainly "ban hostile architecture" is oversimplified in that it leaves room for cities to continue forcing unhoused folks to sleep on the streets, but it has a better ring than "ban hostile architecture and provide stable and safe housing to everyone."
I feel like the later part should be assumed by the fact that leftists have been calling for housing the unhoused for many decades. On the other hand hostile architecture is (to my knowledge) a newer phenomenon that needs to be criticized in it's own right.
"the solution to any large scale problem must always fit on a bumper sticker"