Archinect - News

New York City announces Ya-Ting Liu as its first-ever chief public realm officer

2023-02-17T18:11:00-05:00

In the interest of providing official guardianship for its vast inventory of public spaces, New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday (Feb. 16) announced former transit advocate Ya-Ting Liu will be the city's first-ever public realms officer.

According to the New York Times, her role was created to be a kind of “central point person” for various city agencies and newfound initiatives such as the Open Streets program and outside dining in line with proposals contained in the Making New York for Everyone plan that was developed by the administration and announced in late-December.

“Our city’s public spaces are too important to fall through the cracks of bureaucracy, and now they won’t," Adams said in a press release. "New Yorkers need to know there is one person at City Hall whose number one goal is to improve their quality of life by creating incredible, new public spaces and ensuring the ones we have are clean, equitable, and safe."

Earlier on Archinect: NYC's new planning director...

Bike racks are now being used as hostile architecture in Portland, Oregon

2022-06-17T20:06:00-04:00

On Wednesday, a reader shared with the Mercury a photo of 22 newly-installed single U-shaped bike racks on one block along the eastern sidewalk of NW Broadway. The city's homeless encampment reporting system shows that members of the public have repeatedly reported campers on the sidewalk that's now dotted with bike racks […] The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), which regulates sidewalk use and bike rack installation, said the new racks were completely off their radar.

Bike racks have also been deployed in Seattle to prevent tent encampments after that city’s campaign of police sweeps, which have been mirrored recently by its smaller Pacific Northwest neighbor. The owner of the vacant property adjacent to the racks is himself the developer of an adaptive reuse scheme that transformed a disused former city jail into a private shelter called Bybee Lakes and has lobbied in the past for the removal of encampments downtown, according to the Mercury.

Portland’s growing number of unhoused citizens has been victimized recently by the city’s installation of more common forms of hostile architecture as part of a $44 million public safety spending initiative passed in late November. Three months later, a damning report revealed that Portland’s former mayor Sam Adams (now one of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s top advisors) had been floating an eight-page proposal to warehouse the unsheltered population into three massive semi-temporary facilities operated using soldier...

Hostile Architecture is making more and more people uncomfortable

2021-10-18T10:32:00-04:00

Lately, though, I’ve found myself sitting on a lot of cramped metal benches of the kind that don’t invite you to linger long, or harsh concrete ones that leave you cold. That’s because public seating is becoming an endangered species. If a park bench is not being removed, the backup plan is often to make it uncomfortable. “Hostile architecture” — an urban design strategy intended to impede “antisocial” behavior — is proliferating all over the world.

Cities like San Francisco and Boston have quietly removed seating over the last decade in misguided efforts to curb outdoor sleeping. Interventions like sleep-preventing benches and other forms of cruel deterrents aimed at the homeless population have spilled over into the public sphere.

Recently, the Seattle Art Museum stirred some backlash by installing defensive architecture on its campus as part of an upgraded security plan authored by director Amanda Cruz. Activist collective Design as Protest won this year’s Design Trust for Public Space RFP competition with an initiative that looked to create an alternative to the policies. Other groups have taken measures into their own hands. The New York Times’ Jonathan Lee offers a defense of public seating here.

New Philadelphia park will be designed for, and together with, homeless people

2021-03-22T16:28:00-04:00

Plans are underway to start building in 2022 a pocket park where people experiencing homelessness will not only be welcome but will also be asked to design and build aspects of the space. It’s the only project of its kind in Philadelphia, say design professionals involved in the project.

Supported by a grant from the William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia's largest homeless shelter, the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, aims to plan and build the small pocket park near its facility on North Pearl Street.

Has the public become numb to hostile architecture?

2019-08-19T16:00:00-04:00

As New York grapples with its constant demand for public spaces, some residents are objecting to the restrictive and exclusionary designs and policies that they say reflect an increasingly hostile city. And as more developers build amenities in exchange for greater density, there is increased scrutiny on what passes for free and open public spaces.

The implications for hostile architecture are often presented as subtle design solutions that can aide the public from unwanted city disturbances. However, many individuals are beginning to notice these design efforts to become politically driven initiatives for controlling people experiencing homelessness and loiterers.

Elizabeth Kim from the Gothamist shares in her recent article responses from architects and their perspectives on hostile architecture.

“There are these battles of access that often play out through architecture and urban design,” said Tobias Armborst, a Brooklyn-based architect and urban designer. Armborst co-founded Interboro Partners which focuses on public space design and community engagement. The ethos of the practice highlights design methods that focus on inclusive design and awareness. In 2017 Armborst and his colleagues wrote a book about the topic of hostile architecture called The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion. In regards to hostile architecture Armb...

Lipstick on anti-terror infrastructure

2019-05-14T13:28:00-04:00

Urban designers are increasingly being tasked with an emergent ‘design challenge’ for public spaces: how best to deliver anti-terror infrastructure while generating a pleasant urban environment. By allowing themselves to be drawn into this challenge, and by dutifully working to respond with creative and constructive solutions, they are inadvertently helping to normalize a creeping ‘fortification’ of our cities that in turn contributes to a wider process of ‘bordering’ across the world.

Urbanist Alice Sweitzer and Failed Architecture editor Charlie Clemoes share their thoughts on a booming new design task, "making an increasingly aggressive urban situation more palatable to an ever more anxious citizenry."

Beyond the Map: Spikescapes and Wild Strawberries

2018-04-10T15:30:00-04:00

Geography is getting stranger: the map is breaking up. Now we need to attend to the unnatural places, the escape zones and gap spaces, the places that are sites of surprise but also of bewilderment and unease.

Negotiating the hostile architectures of the modern city — from the anti-pedestrian cobbles of a median strip to the unloved landscape of a traffic island — geographer Alistair Bonnett reflects on the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public space, and by crossing roads and planting strawberries, experiments with modes of resistance.

Debating hostile architecture and its impact on our cities

2017-12-07T15:35:00-05:00

[...] hostile architecture -- a controversial type of urban design aimed at preventing people from using public spaces in undesirable ways. [...] CNN invited architect James Furzer, whose designs try to combat hostile architecture, to debate this issue with Dean Harvey, co-founder of the Factory Furniture: a company that produces many of the offending benches.

"Is it really a bad thing that you're encouraging people to hang around those spaces?," asks architect James Furzer in his CNN debate with Dean Harvey of Factory Furniture, maker of the controversial Camden bench. "Is that not what architecture and design are about? If we designed a building where people didn't want to stay for too long, because it's hostile and uncomfortable, have we succeeded in our jobs as architects? I don't think so."

Read the full debate here.

Architecture in the age of transparent hostility

2016-06-27T15:14:00-04:00

With the growing trend towards hostile architecture now openly admitting its political incentives, are we in an age of transparent hostility? [...] Whereas other instances of hostile architecture are marked by their deliberate obscurity, the Camden Bench was developed, constructed and deployed in plain sight, making it an all too visible reminder of persistent negligence, raising the question: will hostile architecture become an accepted feature of the built environment?