[Laughter] so today i want to talk about hostile architecture if you're not familiar hostile architecture is the type of things that you'll often see in a city such as certain forms of protrusions like spikes or oddly shaped benches that will influence the way that a space is used publicly sometimes you'll see corners filled in certain ways to prevent certain actions being performed in order to control for a cityscape and environment and i want to talk about this from a number of different perspectives first and foremost how a lot of institutions use these types of architecture to generally make public spaces unavailable to people and the example i'm going to use for that is new york city i then want to talk about how it's used against nature and natural creatures like birds in particular and then i want to go into how this is very specifically used to target the homeless and people who are in desperate need in cityscapes and some of the potential solutions that activists have taken in order to secure these spaces so that people have a space to actually lie down and rest their head so first and foremost in new york city you end up with a situation where there are these types of benches where you get these little gaps here that basically make it so that it's really difficult to sit in those spaces and make them purposefully uncomfortable and squeeze people together into tight spaces um you get spikes like this this is the kind of thing in general that we're talking about and like something like this that makes it impossible for for example a skateboard or a person sitting there to be comfortable it is again meant to control the public space and so going through this you end up with a situation where within new york itself because there's such limited real estate hostile architecture has been actually employed by privately owned public spaces in order to limit the amount that they've had to do to maintain those public spaces and what that means is that a lot of buildings will end up setting up contracts and deals with new york city to maybe build a few extra floors or build their towers larger in exchange for treating their lobby areas as sort of a public space we're not the lobby per se but the area right outside the building that area is meant to be treated as a common space and is maintained in order for the building to be built larger and for the company to have more access to profits it's seen as kind of an equal exchange deal however as we've come to find out the city has specifically prohibited devices that inhibit seating in privately owned public spaces since 2007. however as of to a 2017 audit the city comptroller had found that more than half the spaces had violated various city requirements and failed to protect mandated amenities that encourage public uses and so you end up getting these situations where again you get more spikes you end up getting situations where like a public fountain like this where people are meant to congregate or is just completely gated off and nobody's allowed to have access to it you end up getting um essentially as this one person states in the article that you get the message of don't hang out there this is not a public space this is not what you're supposed to be using it for and that they're purposefully trying to keep people away and so like this area is a public space but there's no seating there's no place for people to actually congregate and people often end up sitting on the steps and creating crowds in order to like eat their lunch during their lunch breaks this is a common problem within a city like new york in which you know you get these situations where you basically have to lean against a wall to eat your meal and you get signs like this no loitering on a bench and it just comes out in this very ridiculous and disingenuous way where these businesses are supposed to be practicing a certain thing to create a public space so that people can sit they can eat and can gather together and to utilize it as a public space but businesses have no interest in that because it costs money and is against their bottom line just another example of not being able to trust a capitalist organization with the commons you know whenever that kind of thing happens they'll take as much as they can and extract the resources and then everyone else suffers but at the end of the day there should be benches there should be chairs there should be those little tables with the umbrellas sticking out of them and people should be able to sit down and have a meal in a public space and it should be maintained in that kind of way and i i firmly believe that that kind of architecture should not be being used to actively discourage gatherings like that because just being able to sit outside here on your own property and sit on this brick should be something accessible to people not having a constant reminder that you know you don't belong here and that's really what this is designed to do and this affects every single person it's not just like one section of the community this ends up taking away public access to spaces from people in general and ends up disproportionately affecting people with um who are differently abled because if you can't sit sometimes that can really affect your ability to go out and walk and do things and explore the city and that's not something that i think we should be advocating for as a society we need to be making our public spaces accessible and available for everyone and so that brings me to the next issue and this one is an issue that happened in bristol actually and this is a tree that has literally been spiked with bird spikes i don't know what the proper name for them are but i've always called them bird spikes you'll often see them in the like awnings or under the awnings of shops to prevent birds from flying on top of the awnings so they don't literally just you know stand there and perch and create nest up there which is inconvenient for businesses and communities but this is kind of an extreme version of it where they actually put it in a tree and the thing that this just makes me think of is what is going to happen when that branch eventually falls if you got a good gust of wind in a storm that thing's going to come down and it's going to end up you know really hurting someone and that that's where my mind goes immediately when i see something like this never mind the lack of touch with reality that it seems to bring but in london you often get these type of situations also where you end up getting these types of situations so throughout the united kingdom's cities you'll often see these type of things happen so i suppose the idea was to keep birds off the trees so that they wouldn't um well use the bathroom as it were on people's cars or on people but at the end of the day nature's going to be nature and that's one of the beautiful aspects of a city in my opinion where you're able to see this communal situation where nature is able to somewhat thrive and survive even in the scape of a city and this just speaks to this level of control and wanting to have a certain social order and a certain you know aesthetic appearance of the society and culture that doesn't really have any basis in reality and it's just feels like this overly controlling thing to me it really doesn't speak um to how anything should be functioning but this then brings us to one of the primary concerns that all of this really comes to which is to deter the homeless and deter people from utilizing the public space in a way when they don't have access to any other housing and basically keep people out of sight and out of mind so you get these situations where like heat vents especially that come up from like subway stations or from any sort of area where heat would be exhausted from get these little spikes on them you find these little clear pathways and they put spikes down to keep it keep people away instead of having a you know actual bench where people can sit they put these leaning benches that are slanted so that nobody could lie down on them they'll often add arm uh armrests onto the benches in certain ways so that people cannot lie down and it forces a crowding of people in a very specific way essentially it artificially creates the situation where having this arm rest makes it not accessible as a bed for people um there's certain situations where you know you have rocky pavement so that it's not smooth so people can't rest on it you get situations like with the spiked windowsill that you get weird shaped seats spikes in little corners so that people don't sleep there and uh curved benches this type of situation with bars in a corner and it's just like this really bizarre use of resources and energy and design time then instead of spending money on resources that might actually help the homeless you spend time paying architects to design these very bizarre systems or literally build a cage around to heat them like if you're someone who's homeless and you just want the heat from a vent like this because it's the only means of warmth you have what would they prefer that people just like died of freezing in the street i mean what is the harm in letting people get heat and warmth from this there's no active harm it's just then homeless people become visible and then you also get situations like these which are actually retractable spikes that a business can push up during the night time and during the daytime that will be basically down so people can walk in and out of the place of business but nobody sleeps in the doorway and you know there's there's all sorts of types there's also a type that i'm not going to show because it could potentially harm people with epilepsy but there are cities that actually have these flickering lights that go off at nighttime and can really mess with people give them headaches can cause like i said epileptic seizures and cause other issues that just make it generally inaccessible for someone who needs to sleep on the street to actually be able to get a restful night at the end of the day they use these in a very messed up way and again i'm not sharing that because i don't think it's helpful but i definitely encourage people to look it up if you're not in a place where you might actually get a seizure i just don't want to cause that level of harm or put that out into the video i don't think it's productive and it generally hurts my eyes and head too so i don't want to do that to myself while i'm trying to record so some of the solutions that people have come up with is that they've actually gone out and in true anarchist form have tried to solve the problem themselves and so they've actually tried to cement over a lot of these spikes and create safe havens for people and some artists have gotten together over the years and have tried to come up with different solutions such as sawing off the actual uh armrests on the benches to make them a little bit more accessible so people can get a restful night's sleep you get situations like this where there's a mattress put in place there's um and this one's actually nice because they put a little library for people because how awesome is that for people to be able to read because that's like genuinely just this awesome situation right where you're providing for people in a different way so it's a library and a place to rest like this is the type of community building and mutual aid that we need to be focusing on and collectivizing on and you know even if you're someone sleeping outside that doesn't mean you don't deserve good things or you don't deserve care and something nice like a book to read or a library every now and then i just realized i wasn't showing this off so i'm just gonna pop this on screen here's the bench being sawed off and here's the library with the mattress so you get these situations right where that happens and they fill it in with the cement so yeah basically there's a lot of different tools that can be used uh one other option that i've seen used is they fill in like with a liquid cement or resin on top of the spikes and they'll put like a foam on top of it and these type of situations are used to kind of counteract this kind of hostile architecture as a tool to prevent the public space from being used as it should be publicly and in general we need to see more situations where seats are added into public spaces and you have um you know nature allowed to be nature but also allow for people who don't have a home to just have a space they can crawl into and have a restful night's sleep we deserve sleep we deserve rest we deserve a public space where we can interact and continue to exist and that's how we're going to come together and collectivize and come up with these sorts of mutual aid projects in the first place we need to communicate with each other and we need to be working together in these communal spaces with that said if you like this video give it a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and bell for notifications you can follow me on twitter and check out my discord in the description down below with that said my name is anarchist tara and i hope you enjoyed watching