WATCHER ZINE: DOCUMENTING A HOSTILE CITY
The absurd and strange cruelties of designing a space that hates people
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A space can be built or altered to discourage or preempt its use. These market innovations are called “hostile architecture.” As the cost of living rises in many major cities, hostile architecture has been increasingly deployed in major cities’ wars against the poor. City governments and private parties are fortifying their land against unhoused people—those who might otherwise sleep in planters or shelter from the rain beneath awnings.
San Diego County is already rebuilding itself into a gauche prison, a fortress of jailers.
In Hillcrest, stones jut from planters and medians. Many awnings are slotted, making them poor cover from the rain, and some others are fenced off. Some unhoused people have retreated into the brush—not housed, not sheltered, but pushed further into the margins between surface streets and highways.
One block behind a homelessness service provider in Oceanside, jagged rocks are embedded in cement. These were laid down after the city removed an encampment of unhoused people two years ago. This was the second time that Oceanside laid down stones after clearing an encampment that same year.
I’m told unhoused residents were penalized for sharing food with neighbors who had been banned from the service provider.
The Marina district in downtown San Diego has filled planters with stones and set metal orbs on flat surfaces. Downtown Partnership trashcans are pedal-operated and fortified. When I took a photo of one, an old man approached me and said, “In Alaska they use those kinds of canisters to keep the bears out.”
Throughout the city, benches are segmented. Trash cans are locked shut. Road medians, the spaces under overpasses, and land abutting bike paths are all coated in hostile surfaces. In an odd inversion, some private parties use large planters to block off spaces where unhoused people had previously lived. The walkways narrow.
A homelessness crisis does not occur without a housing affordability crisis—an untenable cost of living. People are worn down and stolen from until they have nothing left. They lose access to basic services. With nowhere to wash, no storage, and no trash services, they live in conditions unfit for their human dignity. Then, unhoused people are mistaken for the conditions they live in. Rather than convicting society for its filth and violence, we often identify unhoused people with the consequences of an inhumane system.
When one derides the city as dirty over the size of its homeless population, one reduces one’s neighbors to a category of filth. If we consider our unhoused neighbors fully human, then both their abject poverty and uncollected litter are products of neoliberal hegemony. The city is not dirty because of the people it has harmed, it is dirty because it is rife with exploitation and it refuses services to its most vulnerable.
This ideology produces a written and physical history. The suffering produced by market solutions are defended in law and punditry. At the same time, those laws produce tangible instruments that reinforce harm. The city devises physical means of removing the people it has failed from public lands. A system which recognizes a firm’s capacity for property ownership produces area denial mechanisms instead of housing.
Stones, fences, gates, cameras, and wrought bars constitute the artifacts of a city’s growing enmity for its inhabitants. As it chooses to force unhoused people into the margins, it affirms its contempt for all. A child playing in the green, a disabled person navigating already fraught streets, young lovers huddling close on a bench—all are worth discarding for the sake of harming the poorest. Homes sit vacant.
The cities of this county have, of course, laid down jagged rocks on their own. Those same cities do not object to businesses doing the same. Some decry the proliferation of homelessness as lawlessness and moral decay on the part of unhoused people. This is a pernicious lie—the victim without power is cast as a powerful villain. The lawlessness is the unfettered rule of the corporation. The moral decay is a society choosing to accept the suffering of the poor, and to endorse further harm.
City government hopes that by harming its unhoused population, San Diego’s most vulnerable will submit to a shell game. No city in the county has the shelter beds necessary to keep our unhoused population safe from the elements, nor is any city on track to build sufficient affordable housing. Yet, no city in the county can tolerate the visibility of its unhoused citizens.
The tributaries of violent policy flow down into homelessness. This unnecessary, violent and inflicted poverty begets death. Despite this, San Diego continues to sculpt the contours of its face into jagged ramparts.
If readers would like to alert me to the location of hostile architecture in the county, shoot me an email. I’ll be returning to this subject matter in future.