![]() I thought, too, of the Homeless Jesus statue, arguably one of Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz’s most famous works. Surely the Palazzo Migliori never welcomed such deserving guests. Many will remember the image of His Eminence seated with his beloved guests, homeless Italian citizens, sharing a meal in safety and dignity. The antithesis to unpleasant design and hostile architecture, it seems to me, was Pope Francis’ surprising and remarkable decision to turn a Vatican palazzo into a Palace of the Poor. It is difficult to imagine deliberately creating barriers for these remarkable citizens merely because they fail to conform to societal expectations. I can’t express how humbling it has been each month to work side by side to clean a shelter or prepare a meal for homeless patrons, with students who are themselves, or who recently were, residents of these facilities. ![]() ![]() It may surprise readers to know that a majority of the participants in the program also volunteer with me in the President’s Volunteer Team initiatives, which specifically serve our community’s most vulnerable populations. The program is offered free of charge to Calgary’s most economically disadvantaged citizens. Mary’s University in Calgary, for example, offers the Humanities 101 program - bridging courses that help those with interrupted educational journeys to have access to higher education. I thought of all this in the context of my own university’s commitment to social justice, and a number of long-standing initiatives that model a different approach to supporting those who are marginalized. Unpleasant design reinforces this injustice.” Savic makes the important point that “there is a certain kind of spatial injustice that arises from the reduction of access to space based on income, or some biological determinant - race, gender, age. What, though, is the wider cost to this defensive design? For post-doctoral fellow Selena Savic, co-editor of Unpleasant Design, “the social cost is a certain kind of segregation, which is observable on other levels of social organization, beyond design of urban spaces.” One could add that it validates and allows a level of denial of social challenges, pushing those - especially the homeless - out of our visible spaces so their plight can more comfortably and comprehensively be forgotten or ignored. And of course, for many, the practice has the principal advantage of keeping the “unwanted” out of sight and hence out of mind. Today it is the studded bench that makes skateboard tricks impossible to perform. In the 19th century, doorways were fitted with rounded, projecting brickwork to stop men from urinating in the corners. Indeed, there is a ready nomenclature of “silent agents,” as they have been called, that work to support the phenomenon known as “unpleasant design”: bum-proof benches, pay-per-minute seating and comfort-destroyers.Ī clear reason for these covert and overt architectural strategies is to police public spaces to keep out undesirables - people and practices - resulting in significant savings through reduction in harmful behaviour and clean-up costs. Many cities have installed “artistic” sculptures specifically designed to fit over heated subway grills to ensure that homeless people cannot sit on these to avoid freezing to death in minus-40 degree temperatures. Most of us have seen the “anti-homeless spikes” and studs that have been embedded in low-level windowsills, around fountains and even in underpasses. No one living in a major city will have failed to see benches in bus shelters built on an incline with a solid armrest welded in the middle to ensure that a destitute person cannot lie down on it. Exclusionary design, as it has also been called, is a practice of using defensive architectural practices and materials to create barriers that exclude “undesirables”: the homeless and young people, in particular skateboarders. “This is exactly what the city has done to the homeless,” she pointed out with indignity, and we researched the many ways a city putatively guards against difference through its physical infrastructure. My daughter’s first reaction to this was to compare the situation to hostile architecture, and I was reminded immediately why I so admire my 18-year-old activist.
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