Have you ever noticed how park benches have armrests in the middle of the bench or storefront ledges have metal spikes? The spikes aren’t decorative. And the armrests aren’t primarily meant to be more comfortable for your arms. These features of urban life, and the many designs just like them, are what’s known as “hostile architecture.” They are deliberate attempts to deter or prevent people—typically, the unhoused—from resting or sleeping on flat surfaces.
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Hostile architecture of this kind can be found in most U.S. cities. We can think of it as overtly hostile; the benches and ledges are obvious and noticeable. But overt hostility represents just a fraction of the ways architecture is truly hostile to people in all of the spaces we inhabit every day. The truth is, hostile architecture may be overt, but it’s the more covert aspects of design—the unintentional flaws that we don’t often notice—that also cause everyday damage to our wellbeing.
Architecture that is covertly hostile is all around us: at home, at work, at school, on our roads, and in our hospitals. Once we acknowledge these invisible forces, we can start designing in ways that counteract them, so that our environments better support us.
To offer a glimpse into this world of covert hostility, here are several environments where architecture’s covert hostility affects us the most:
Home
People living in both urban and suburban homes suffer from unique forms of covert hostility. In urban areas, apartments and condominiums with cheap, thin walls create excessive noise pollution. When under-insulated walls separate you from your neighbors, you have no choice but to hear their constant chatter, loud TVs, music, barking dogs, and other disturbances that can lead to poor sleep and chronically high levels of stress. Because of poor design, you have a higher risk of mental and physical health problems day after day.
In America’s suburbs, this hostility appears in more insidious ways. Most single family homes are cookie-cutter and placed without consideration for how the sun travels throughout the day. They’re also designed to make developers a profit so there’s little thought or investment in your thermal comfort (how well the house can stay warm or cool when you need it to). For instance, many houses with south-facing windows don’t take into account the hot sunlight that will hit the windows and glass doors all day long and raise the temperature inside the home. These extreme temperature fluctuations make you uncomfortable and lethargic.
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Not to mention, the added energy required to cool the home back to comfortable temperatures means families pay more for their electric bill, which inequitably burdens people in lower socioeconomic brackets. A problem that could have been solved by architecture—by strategically planting trees to provide shade in the summertime or installing window overhangs to keep sunlight off the glass—now falls to expensive and energy-intensive technology like air-conditioning.
Our homes are where we spend most of our lives. We should be careful to design them in ways that support people’s biological, psychological, and practical needs.
Work
Office spaces are meant to be spaces for both deep thought and creativity. However, in many ways, the modern office is ill-suited to achieve these goals.
Consider the fact that the typical ceiling in American offices is only slightly taller than residential buildings: roughly nine feet. This is because shorter ceilings save real estate developers money on construction costs. But psychological research has shown that we tend to be less creative under shorter ceilings of eight to 10 feet compared to ceilings that are 12 feet high or more. If your employer wants you to be creative, shorter ceilings won’t help you tap into that kind of thinking. Instead, you’ll always feel constrained by a looming ceiling that feels cramped and provides no expansiveness.
In addition, many offices today are arranged in open-concept floor plans where everyone works among everyone else. And while it does create better social interaction, open-floor concepts tend to be disruptive, and a poor environment for getting your work done. According to design firm Gensler’s 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey, 53% of employees in an open-floor plan said they were disturbed by others while trying to focus. When the researchers looked at how the disruptions affected performance, they found a 6% drop in productivity over a five-year span. The promise of open offices as buzzing hubs for creativity is a myth. They are hostile to your performance.
The ability to focus isn’t the only thing at stake. You may be more exposed to the spread of germs and airborne pathogens in open offices much more easily than if you had your own private office. According to a 2020 meta-analysis of studies involving more than 13,000 office workers, people who worked in open offices took more sick days, on average, than those who worked in private offices. The results of the meta-analysis suggest that private offices seem to provide the same protection from infectious disease that private hospital rooms do. And yet, most workers don’t get this luxury. We must rely on our own immune systems to protect us.
In every town you go, the poor design of offices is bound to make you sicker, less creative, less focused, and less productive.
School
Schools are precious environments for nurturing children into healthy, well-adjusted adults. But most schools are quietly but actively hostile to learning taking place.
In many American classrooms, for example, students don’t receive adequate levels of natural sunlight. The rooms are lit instead by harsh overhead fluorescent lighting, which isn’t just unpleasant but may actually hurt your child’s performance. One study from 2021 found that, among more than 2,600 students in 12 countries, students performed up to 20% worse when classrooms had the worst natural lighting conditions compared to students exposed to the most natural light.
Sometimes what makes schools hostile comes from a place of caring. Many well-meaning teachers will decorate their rooms with posters, signs, and arts and crafts as a way to inspire students and display their work, but often these visual stimuli make it harder for students, especially young kids, to concentrate. Research has found excess decor causes students to perform worse on tests than students in more sparsely decorated rooms.
The same goes for noise pollution: How often do we think about the impact of HVAC systems in schools? We should, because excess noise can hurt kids, too. Students have been shown to perform up to 20% worse on tests in noisier environments versus quieter ones. Most classrooms also have noise problems because of their materials and furniture. Hard walls and floors, combined with screech furniture, create noises that reduce speech intelligibility, or how much a student can hear. In fact, in many classrooms students can only hear roughly 75% of what’s being said, no matter how hard they try. Our kids are suffering because of poor design decisions.
Transportation
How easily you can get around your town or city influences your well-being. Unfortunately, most of the urban planning in American suburbs forces us to be car-dependent. In 2021, an estimated 5.4 million people were injured in a car accident, and nearly 43,000 people died. But it’s not just the inherent danger of driving that makes our roads hostile; it’s also the side effects of a car-dependent transit system. Sitting in the densest rush-hour traffic has been shown to increase rates of nighttime domestic violence by up to 9%. Such are the risks of hostile urban planning: The stresses of the road can ruin relationships at home.
Car-dependent communities are also hostile to your long-term health and longevity. When neighborhoods aren’t designed with movement in mind, you tend to feel less safe walking or biking, lead a more sedentary life, and suffer declines in physical and mental health. If you are over 60 in a place like this, you have a 22% greater risk of dying and are 33% less likely to report good mental health.
Much of suburbia’s covert hostility can be found in how you get from one place to another. When you live in the suburbs, you don’t have many options for public transportation and become dependent on your car. And as a result, instead of your environment making a healthy life easier to maintain, poor urban planning means you have to fight against daily negative influences.
All of these forms of covert hostility are not set in stone. We must begin to recognize that our homes, offices, schools, and roads aren’t just backdrops to our lives—they are active participants in shaping the kinds of people we become.
For any space we design, it’s vital that we take these changes into consideration. Because our spaces always inevitably change us, either in positive or negative ways. It’s up to each of us to make sure they change us—and society—for the better.
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