ave you ever noticed how park benches have armrests in the middle of the bench or storefront ledges have metal spikes? The spikes aren’t decorative. And the armrests aren’t primarily meant to be more comfortable for your arms. These features of urban life, and the many designs just like them, are what’s known as They are deliberate attempts to deter or prevent people—typically, the unhoused—from resting or sleeping on flat surfaces.
Hostile architecture of this kind can be found in most U.S. cities.
We can think of it as hostile; the benches and ledges are obvious and noticeable. But overt hostility represents just a fraction of the ways architecture is truly hostile to people in all of the spaces we inhabit every day. The truth is, hostile architecture may be overt, but it’s the more covert aspects of design—the unintentional flaws that we don’t often notice—that also cause everyday damage to our wellbeing.
Architecture that is covertly hostile is all around us: at home, at work, at school, on our roads, and in our hospitals. Once we acknowledge these invisible forces, we can start designing in ways that counteract them, so that our environments better support us. To offer a glimpse into this world of covert hostility, here are several environments where architecture's covert hostility affects us the most: People living in both urban and suburban homes suffer from unique forms of covert hostility.
In urban areas, apartments and condominiums with cheap, thin.