It’s one of those things that, once you’ve seen, you can’t unsee. Once you’ve noticed the curved benches, the spikes embedded in doorways, the posts made for leaning rather than sitting, the carefully placed railings… even the planters placed in careful rows outside shops, you can no longer walk through a city without thinking about the fact that it is designed to prevent comfort.
I’ve written before about the permanent blind spot I developed in my right eye, a “persistent migraine aura” that hovers now at the centre of my computer screen; walking through public spaces where walls are decorated at waist-height with bright metal fins is a similar experience, a constant shimmering reminder of a particular pain. They call these sharp fins and benches “defensive design” or, more accurately, “hostile architecture”, where the built environment purposefully guides and restricts behaviour. It’s intended to deter homeless people from resting between its sharp or awkward edges but, increasingly, it has the added effect of making a city less comfortable for everyone else.
I find these sanitised spaces make everybody rush through them, meaning there’s less opportunity for chance encounters, for communities to form, for idle thought. Rather than making an area feel more safe, these designs impact us in mean and insidious ways, partly because few people would rather lean on a pole than sit on a chair when waiting for their bus, and because uneven surfaces make using a wheelchair or buggy much harder. But also because these grim balls and spikes are a reminder of how we are all being controlled the second we step outside and how, should we take a wrong turn one day and experience homelessness ourselves, the city would change shape.
After Suella Braverman suggested that rough sleeping was a “lifestyle choice”, cities saw police officers dispersing homeless people by throwing out their tents. This year, the Vagrancy Act (which made rough sleeping a criminal offence as a response to homelessness among soldiers following the Battle of Waterloo) celebrates its 200th birthday. The government has pledged to scrap it. But instead of getting rid of the act altogether – an acknowledgment that criminalisation is more likely to push someone further away from services that help them move off the streets, rather than resolve the causes of homelessness –, they are bringing in new measures to replace it.
These new measures are just as punitive: police can prosecute rough sleepers or anyone who appears to be homeless, if they say they’re “likely to cause” a “nuisance”. Under the new criminal justice bill, this includes “excessive smells” and using “insulting” words. Punishment includes prison and fines of up to £2,500.
In 2022, a civil liberties organisation handed out legal advice cards about the laws around Community Protection Notices (CPNs), powers often used today by police and council officers to criminalise behaviour associated with homelessness. Liberty were acting as lawyers for people restricted from things like “loitering” without an appointment, or being “in possession of any open containers or cups”, which they could potentially use to beg for money.
As if it isn’t dangerous, traumatic or humiliating enough to sleep on the street, you not only face punishment for doing so, but the architecture itself is also designed to move you on. A steel and concrete reminder that you are unwelcome here, a project in erasure. Last week, it was announced that an official count of the deaths of homeless people would no longer be published in England and Wales. The homelessness charity Crisis said this move would “only ensure this needless suffering continues out of sight”.
Walking through the city I have the growing feeling that our government is more interested in removing homeless people from view than removing homelessness itself. In the US, there’s evidence that backs this up; cities there are spending more on criminalising and displacing rough sleepers than it costs to house them. “Sweeps, incarceration, enforcement of anti-panhandling laws and hostile architecture, after all, come with a hefty price tag estimated to be more than $31,000 per person, per year,” reports Jacobin. “The annual cost of providing supportive housing, according to the same analysis, is $10,051 – or less than a third of the cost of criminalisation.”
It’s becoming more and more clear that we are welcome in public spaces only if we are moving fast and spending money. And yet, we are all one missed rent payment, one bad boyfriend, one sharp new policy away from poverty or homelessness. Last year, record numbers of people sought help in accessing homeless services, food banks and energy bill support, Citizens Advice reported, amid the “cost of living crisis”. This phrase – we use it so casually today, immunised against its real meaning, which is the extortionate price of staying alive. These spikes are a grim illustration of how public spaces are increasingly not for the public at all. While billionaires build underground bunkers, and suburban doorbell security cameras monitor every passerby’s movement, as I pass another sloping bench, this hostile architecture feels like a concrete embodiment of a society at war with itself.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
