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The Flux State of Public Space Today, our streets are armed: armed with spikes and unusable benches and even more discrete measures. They protect us from those whom we fear most-people unlike our law-abiding, responsible selves. Criminals, homeless, teenagers, drug-dealers, and political activists linger in our public spaces. The battle for the streets has begun. Or, at least, this is what lawmakers hoped we would believe.
In truth, the battle for the streets has been an ongoing struggle ever since "streets" came into existence. Henri Lefebvre, French sociologist and author of The Production of Space, states that "space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction," such as space considered in mathematics.1 But public space is never an abstraction; Lefebvre describes it as the nexus of three spheres: the physical-"nature, the Cosmos;" the mental-the realm of the decision-maker, "including logical and formal abstractions;" and the social- "the space of social practice...occupied by sensory phenomena."2 Each of these spheres fight for influence over the public space, like a large game of tug-ofwar. Each space has its own competitors in the game. While the mental sphere may triumph in one space, the social will dominate another, and the physical will reclaim those spaces abandoned by the other two.
Public space has always been this contentious zone. Today, it is the most contentious due to the development of hostile architecture-a term coined to describe the spikes and unusable benches designed to discourage loitering and other undesirable activities. For its adversaries, hostile architecture is the physical embodiment of the watch-dog state. There is a sense of the impending loss of civil liberties. But for its advocates, hostile architecture is a safety measure, a crime reduction strategy aimed at allowing citizens to reclaim public spaces. Both sides, it seems, have valid arguments.
How a War is Started
The history of hostile architecture is long and falls under many names, such as "exclusionary design" or "defensive architecture," but it has always had a common purpose: to deter certain activities. In the 19th century, this included public urination on church facades. Today, this includes skateboarding on benches. How did we get here? Who decided that skateboarding is not allowed?
Behind our current form of hostile architecture lies a milieu of social, economic, and...