#hostile architecture

[rabbitrah]

"Le repos du fakir" (2003), Stéphane Argillet and Gilles Paté

[whereserpentswalk]

Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Disappearance of the Public Bench

Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban public spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose mo

Benches aren’t just disappearing from large railroad stations, but also from subways, parks, plazas, sidewalks, and esplanades. Public transit systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, and New York City have lost benches, as have the entrance to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a National Park plaza in Washington, D.C., a thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a boulevard dedicated to Korean veterans in Nashville, and a tiny riverfront park in Janesville, Wisconsin. Some of these seats were replaced with armatures for perching or leaning, but most were not. There is no firm data on how many benches have been removed in total, nor when the trend precisely started. But anecdotal evidence suggests that in the past decade, across the United States, hundreds of places to sit in public have quietly disappeared. Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities. They’re sites of leisure and contestation that invite a range of constituencies with vastly differing needs and desires. Office workers may lunch and seniors may rest, but teenagers might socialize at decibels unwelcome by their elders. Benches beckon skateboarders trying to perfect their nosegrinds, and men who sip drinks concealed in paper bags. Unlike parks or homeless shelters, they’re small and relatively inexpensive interventions, six-foot-long microcosms of a far broader debate over whom our cities should be structured to serve and how best to do so. To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.

21 April 2026

[prokopetz]

Playing one of those Backrooms-inspired liminal horror games and my first sign that I've passed into some unnatural realm is that there's way too much accessible public seating.

[theconcealedweapon]

This is bullshit.

Wheelchair users are not looking for a place to sit. There's no reason why a wheelchair user would have to specifically sit in the middle of a bench.

This is anti-homeless hostile architecture attempting to disguise itself as progressive.

[kropotkindersurprise]

Comrade Corvid dismantles the tools of oppression used against his fellow birds.

[trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter]

I hate hostile architecture! Inspired by seeing it everywhere in the city :[

🎶Cities hate the homeless! For existing!🎵

[just-gadfly-things]

Birds dismantling hostile architecture posts

The Smithsonian Magazine reported on a research paper about this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/crows-and-magpies-snatch-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-their-nests-180982546

The research (PDF)

The article links to this tweet by an author of the study, Auke-Florian Hiemstra...

And here is a magpie nest in a tree, photographed by the same guy...

There are more cute photos and adorable comments in this Audubon article about the paper: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/apparently-magpies-and-crows-are-using-anti-bird-spikes-make-their-nests

...Cockatoos have fun too!