{"id":3266,"date":"2014-06-24T06:29:34","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T12:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3266"},"modified":"2014-06-28T13:22:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T19:22:14","slug":"sadistic-urbanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=3266","title":{"rendered":"Sadistic Urbanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/em> just ran a story<\/a> about the steps that Honolulu is taking to crack down on the homeless in an effort to shore up its tourism industry. Homelessness is up 32% in Honolulu over the past 5 years. This has produced aggressive panhandling and frightened tourists. The city\u2019s response includes seizing the property of homeless persons, fining them for public urination, prohibiting lying or sitting on sidewalks, closing public parks at night, and banning tents and lean-tos in public spaces. There\u2019s some set-aside money for building low-cost housing, but that\u2019s a longer-term goal. Honolulu\u2019s mayor Kirk Caldwell describes this set of strategies as \u201ccompassionate disruption<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Honolulu Homeless (Elyse Butler, New York Times)<\/p><\/div>\n

This story appears at a time when other kinds of strategies for disrupting the lives of the homeless\u2014strategies of a more direct, material nature<\/a>\u2014are back in the news. These include the tactic of placing spikes or studs<\/a> in doorways and ledges to prevent sitting or sleeping by homeless persons, and furnishing public spaces with uncomfortable benches<\/a> that have the same disruptive and displacing effects.<\/p>\n

\"2<\/a>

Metal Studs on Southwark Bridge Road, London (Andrew Horton, Worldviewmedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

The spikes in the London case (above) were removed after great public outcry, including criticism from London\u2019s mayor, Boris Johnson<\/a>. But they remain widely used in other cities. \u00a0 Also widely used is the \u201cbum proof bench\u201d, whose variants are most recently catalogued by Georgia Tech’s\u00a0Robert Rosenberger<\/a>. \u00a0The Guardian<\/i>‘s\u00a0<\/i>Ben Quinn<\/a> describes these tactics as \u201chostile architecture.\u201d He reminds us that sound can also have a hostile effect, such as the use of classical music, birdsong, and mosquito devices<\/a> to discourage loitering by teenagers and other undesirables. Aurelian Bouayad<\/a> refers to such tactics as \u201cdisciplinary architecture.\u201d Bouayad\u2019s piece does an especially nice job of directing readers to the seminal literature that demonstrates the power of urban materiality to shape, constrain, and regulate human behavior. This includes Langdon Winner\u2019s famous 1980 article in Daedulus<\/em> called \u201cDo Artifacts Have Politics?<\/a>,\u201d and Mike Davis\u2019 terrific 1990 book City of Quartz<\/em><\/a> that\u2019s indispensable for understanding sadistic street environments in Los Angeles<\/a> and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\"3<\/a>

Tubular, Stainless Steel Bench in Ikebukuro West Park, Tokyo: Hot in Summer, Cold in Winter (Yumiko Hayakawa)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cHostile\u201d and \u201cDisciplinary\u201d architecture are apt terms for describing much of the contemporary built environment of cities. Other observers use terms like \u201cDefensive<\/a>\u201d, \u201cAggressive\u201d, and \u201cFortress\u201d architecture. However they\u2019re described, these material interventions are perhaps most usefully classified\u2014following Mike Davis\u2014under a broader category of Sadistic Urbanism<\/em><\/strong> that would also include the socio-legal interventions that Honolulu\u2019s Mayor Caldwell proposes as solution to the problem of homelessness. The alternative to Sadistic Urbanism is not the \u201ccompassionate\u201d disruption championed by Mayor Caldwell but rather a humane urbanism that provides safe and affordable housing\u00a0plus the\u00a0other amenities that we citizens ought to reasonably expect in any city that\u2019s planned and designed for use by multiple publics: comfortable street-side seating, widely accessible parks and other common spaces, safe and reliable mass transit, value shopping and healthy eating alternatives, and a critical mass of free public restrooms.<\/p>\n

\"archisuitBench\"<\/a>

Retrofitting the Bum-Proof Bench: “Archisuit”, by Sarah Ross<\/p><\/div>\n

There are some clever, tongue-in-cheek proposals for how today\u2019s increasingly sadistic street environment might be reclaimed by\u00a0citizens via architectural counter-interventions. These include inflatable benches that convert to homeless shelters<\/a> and suits that allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them<\/a>\u00a0(above). At the end of the day, however, we\u2019ll certainly need solutions that are more substantive and democratic. They will only be found in the area where participatory planning, humane design, and political will intersect.<\/p>\n

\"BENCH4-articleLarge\"<\/a>

How We Ought to Live: Bench in Peter Minuit Plaza, Manhattan (Jabin Botsford, The New York Times)<\/p><\/div>\n

This essay was reposted to Sustainable Cities Collective<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The New York Times just ran a story about the steps that Honolulu is taking to crack down on the homeless in an effort to shore up its tourism industry. Homelessness is up 32% in Honolulu over the past 5 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,5,8,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-books","category-general","category-placemaking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-QG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3266"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3292,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions\/3292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}