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 Freedom and Hostile DesignSeason 3, Episode 4Complete Transcript Barry: There's a story that Nick Riggle likes to use as an example in his work. Nick was a big name in professional rollerblading in the late 90s, he competed at a few X Games, invented an entire genre of skating called mushroom blading. Today:Nick: I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and an author, a writer.Barry: the story involves a guy named Jeremy Fry. Jeremy’s is a wiry kid with glasses and shaggy hair, kind of like a teenaged Bill Gates but dweebier. Jeremy is sitting in the stands at a Celtics game with maybe his mom? And Bon Jovi's “Livin on a Prayer” starts to play on the loudspeakers, suddenly he's on the jumbotron.NR: he was lip-syncing and air guitaring and dancing to the song, and he started interacting with the crowd as Bon Jovi and the crowd oort of took it up and they were there expressing themselves, he is sort of playing around, and it created this environment of sort of mutual expression and appreciation through that expression, that is awesomeness.Barry: that's the central theme of Nick’s bookNR: On Being Awesome: a unified theory of how not to suckBarry: being awesome and sucking for Nick has become a very distinctively social way we evaluate works of art and acts of expression.NR: for some reason as I discuss in the book we adopted the word awesome to talk about the kinds of creative community building that awesome people in the newfangled sense achieve.Barry: Jeremy Fry is a prototype of Awesomeness NR: he's the creative community builder he created what I call as “social opening” and the social opening gave the rest of the crowd an opportunity to be down and to take up the social opening.Barry: so sucking, what's the relationship between that and Awesomeness in your view? NR: sucking is a matter of failing to take up a social opening for no good reason, so in the middle of this performance he sort of approaches this one guy and the guy just sort of mimics kicking him and sort of nudges him away, that sucks right, this guy sucks, and if you look at the YouTube comments you just see like he's clearly singled out as like someone who really fails in this social context, as it were, get it.Barry: Nick is a philosopher of art, and as a philosopher of art Nick thinks that the way we judge the impact of art on a social community is just as important as judging art according to how it affects us when we experience it personally.NR: the value of art isn't wholly encapsulated in its capacity to give me pleasure or give you excitement or or a shock, and so when you think about what art does for us and you move just beyond ever-so-slightly beyond the individual you see like, “oh yeah you know we can bond over an album, over our love for a podcast.” The value that that has for two people or for a subculture isn't just sort of the pleasure it gives all of us.Barry: something about the role that it plays in establishing social relationships?NR: yeah yeah establishing social relationships through the mutual cultivation of of our individualityBarry: and when we recognize broader categories we use to evaluate art we come to broader categories of art as well. You come to recognize the artistry in rollerblading or skateboarding for example. NR: street art is art that uses the street artistically. The street is sort of this vague concept I think of the street as this cultural space, it's where I can sort of flaunt my style or express my commitments and to use it artistically is to take that cultural space and highlight its function or enhance its function or augment it in some way.Barry: if you think about it street art has this great advantage in being awesome in a way that paintings in a gallery just don't. They exist in public spaces are meant to interact directly with the communities that look at it or engage with it. It's a lot easier to create a social opening when the art takes place in a social context.NR: Bruno Taylor, I think, put swings in bus stops now that's a classic piece of street art in my view, because it's like here you took this this public street space, you made it easier and more attractive for people to express themselves in public, it's just boring you sit on a bench and like wait so why not have like swings there, stuff to play with? I think this is really a wonderful piece of street art and like that's the kind of creative community building via art that a city could get in on, crosswalk design could be more playful, thought-provoking, attention-grabbing. These works are so interesting because their value seems to consist in something that we'd normally theorize in ethical terms, empathy, mutual attention, mutual respect even. But we want to say that they're great works.Barry: the way that they're great works is that they're awesome. Do you think that we have a dearth or an excess of awesomeness? And do you think we should be actively trying to create it?NR: yeah I think I think we should yeah I think there's a kind of a dearth of awesomeness. There's a dearth of the of the kind of social risks that you mentioned. The social risk that is a kind of creative risk aimed at community building.Barry: The advantage that street art has in being awesome, also makes it even more susceptible to sucking in fact some of the suckiest things that ever sucked are designed for the street, you find it all over the place. That's actually what today show is about, street designs that suck in the sense of Nick Riggle’s theory. They're antisocial, they close off social openings, I found street designs that suck so bad that artists feel they have to vandalize them just to bring some humanity and awesomeness back to the street.From Vassar College you’re listening to Hi-Phi Nation a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam.The philosopher Richard Rowland of the Australian Catholic University produced this story for us from the UK.RR: when Leah Borromeo was riding her bike down Curtain Road in East London one evening she was looking for something very specific.LB: a bunch of sharpened butt plugs on a flat surface where you could otherwise shelter from the rain or sit down or just chill out RR: Curtain Road is in Shoreditch in East London. Shoreditch is now heavily gentrified, but it used to be a poor area filled with old warehouses where artists could afford cheap studios. Curtain Road today LB: has a very visible homeless population which has been pushed to the margins and pushed to the edges of the area by people with money. Those sort of nooks and crannies and safe places for people who've suddenly come down on their luck are becoming few and far between.RR: Leah is an artist LB: a journalist and filmmaker and erstwhile interventionistRR: the reason why I was looking for these “sharpened butt plugs” as she put it was because she had a experience earlier in the day during her lunch break.LB: I was walking to and from lunch and outside one of the supermarkets, there were a couple of women who save advanced years they had their shopping with them and they want us to sit down and they found a ledge and they found some spikes on the ledge, and I looked at the spikes and I sort of went “holy Wow,” and they were pointy sharp sharpened butt pluggy kind of, and they weren't pleasant you know, it's like those sort of beds of nails that kafirs would be lying on for a fur you know funRR: these things are actually aunty homeless spikes and they're showing up on flat surfaces all over the city. LB: I was like okay so now there's nowhere for you to sit, and so I got this conversation with some of the women there and and I have a nasty North American habit of talking to strangers. And some was like, “well somebody should do something about this.”RR: so after work Leah went cruising on her bike to find a particularly visible sets of anti-homeless spikes, she had an idea.LB: thinking about it on the sort of cycle ride home I just thought “well there's that's a bed of nails. Well I’ll make it into a bed.” I went to a local hardware store and asked them what would the tackiest glue for the tackiest adhesive they had give me the one that's the biggest pain in the ass, and it's like all right yeah remember like the ones you can hang cars from on? You know that kind of I want that. I went down to my local friendly foam dealer slathered that on the bottom and then carted it out. Bearing in mind we'd measured all of this we'd measured the distance between the spikes and we'd put those holes in the mattresses, so it would fit that thing does not go.RR: in addition to clearing a bed on top of the spikes, Leah installed a library of books and papers about gentrification and housing.LB: so I chose to install a library to give the installation and to give the bed, as it were, that added bit of history in that add a bit of context, because libraries are safe and neutral spaces, at least in my mind and they're welcoming places for anybody, so university students to esteem professors to people who just want to get in from the cold. Libraries have always had that kind of for me especially if you're if your secular a kind of church-like role and I thought it was essential to have some things that was stocked full of books and papers that could remind people of how we got to where we are, how we got to the situation where people thought it was necessary, to plant, to install that kind of furniture in such an overt and nasty way, and why there were another bunch of people who thought “you can't get away with this we're gonna take the piss out of you.”RR: Leah’s installations “space, not spikes” survived for quite some time.LB: I kept counting about five days, five, six days, on the sixth day I somebody told me, “I think it's gone, as it was, but there's a hell of a lot of blue foam left.”RR: Leah’s part of a growing movement of artists and activists responding to hostile design sometimes called defensive architecture.Barry: Do you know about hostile design where cities just create…RA: the introduction of studs along hard edges to stop people grinding skateboards, it's terrible. The segmented street benches to stop people lying down, sheets of glass at forty-five degrees that looked like they might break if you sat on them or lay against them. NR: You take something that would otherwise be attractive, and if used by skaters, something that is a locus of sport and engagement and style development and all these great human things and you just like put gross knobs where you can't even sit down on the thing anymore RA: Glenn Osaka there was literally a shower rail along the wall of a part of a district and if you slept there overnight they would literally turn the showers on to remove people. I'm Roland Atkinson I'm a chair in inclusive societies here at the University of Sheffield and I also work in the department of urban studies and planning. Defensive architecture I suppose the easiest way of thinking about that is to consider the use of design technologies and forms of architecture which are about excluding particular groups and populations. The most common group that we're talking about is the homeless.RR: there's a social problem that hostile design is meant to solve, and it isn't the problem of homelessness or public nuisance as such, it's the problem that certain citizens who are also entitled to use the streets often feel excluded, uncomfortable or threatened in public spaces due to the presence of others.RA: you know we had to accept that there's a kind of potentially empowering aspect to some of this stuff you know it's about who has a right to the city and um and on what terms. The skateboarders can be quite intimidating to our older people young children and women might have might feel more comfortable in spaces that traditionally they would not have felt comfortable in.RR: defensive architecture can be used as a last overt way of stopping people using city spaces in particular ways, ways that others find threatening or simply off-putting. If you think about it what are the alternatives? Explicit laws and the use of police? Telling people to just put up with it? It is not clear what the more moral or humane alternative is here.RR: Victor Callister is another Londoner and a very tolerant person he's also--VC: deputy director at Design Council Cape in London and we are design advice providersRR: Victor has personal experience a defensive designing VC: the place that I live, I have a door that goes straight onto the street in East London and the estate agent was very keen to make sure that I visited the street before nine o'clock in the morning, because that's before the drug addicts actually get up, so as an effort I bought the place and then realized that my front steve is effectively occupied by drug addicts and people who were sleeping rough and shouting and screaming and having all kinds of dramas all day long. So the approach that was taken, the residents in the building that I part own, was to put in place traditional railings along the stoop so we excluded people from sitting by actually putting the railings and gates.RR: and what can be a more reasonable low-cost solution to a neighborhood problem than defensive design?VC: the result of that is that it did move people on because it wasn't a great space to spend two or three hours waiting for the dealer to turn up RR: but eventually as you move the problem around more and more people get the same idea displacing the problem to the next neighborhood over and so finally you have a city that's trying to design out entire groups of people. Is that a solution to the social problem? Do we really want all our streets cleansed in this way?VC: it's really clear that there are different ways of thinking about streets compared to an artificial straight in the shopping center. What's great about city streets is they absolutely have everything that's kind of grubby and slightly, so it's reputable that makes them the sort of streets that you want to ponder sit and have a coffee on. I would rather have a coffee and Fifth Street in Soho outside of Bar Italia than outside of any coffee shop in any shopping center anywhere in the world. There is no question about that. To me it's always really interesting to see why developers very happy to actually walk down streets and to be in streets on the way to their own private streets, but somehow they're uncomfortable about the kind of people that we'd find in an ordinary street actually being in their environment.RR: eventually we get back to Leah and other artists around Europe, Chicago and Los Angeles who started turning spikes and partition benches into beds and leaning rails into chairs, and the general public whose interests these defensive designs were meant to protect, responded.Can you he told me a bit about the reaction to Space, Not Spikes?LB: the weird thing about that was how it kind of blew up, you know I think it hit I think it's what they call the virality, so it's one of those things you never would never quite expect it, because the next morning a street artist friend of ours called Stick we came down and he's formerly homeless, he's like “Do you want some actual homeless people here to like use it?” And I was like, “Yeah!” I wrote a piece up, sent it to an outfit called Little Adams, two and a half hours later he’s like, “So I've turned into your personal manager now and you've got requests from-” and he just listed the number of people who got in touch with him, everyone just picked up on it. The weirdest one is I was out filming months later in Bolivia and on the streets of La Paz I'd picked up the equivalent of the Big Issue which is a kind of magazine sold by homeless people and people who work on the street, “Oh my god,” it was in this magazine that was set up you know in La Paz of all the places I was like that's you know it immediately goes out to the guy it's like that some things like “yeah” and I was like “what” And I just started having this conversation in you know my broken Spanish with the guys like what the hell? And what he was saying a lot of people, they were saying was that you know it's it's something that touched a nerve, not just for something specific to London and Curtin Road, and that was what we were wanting to address. It touched a nerve in a kind of human level it, I suppose guilted people into thinking, “Oh gosh that's us I'm complicit in that.”Barry: Perhaps one of the reasons that the public became so hostile to hostile design was how obviously these features of the street sucked in Nick Riggle’s sense of the term. It wasn't just the homeless or drug users or skaters that looked like they were being controlled by the built environment. Leah Borromeo’s street art activism is a direct response to more general tendencies than everyone seemed to be noticing about the urban environment. Dr. Roland Atkinson:RA: you know a lot of what we're talking about in terms of defensive architecture actually is the production of very sterile cleanable sort of space that offers no points of accommodation to anyone or full-stop, with buildings which go down to ground level with no shopfront and with no recesses with no space with no benches and all the rest of it. That in itself is another form of design which is hostile to social encounter, to people resting two people finding a place in the city, and almost that's as big a problem as the the more overt forms of defensive architecture. We've seen increasing securitization and a lot of that it's also pushed by the insurance industry who want to ensure that the places are safe that they're not they're not in any sense a risk in insurance terms, and all of those interests kind of combine in what we call the privatization of public space, and I think those things have a quite subtle effect as well that you know it changes people's behavior that they adopt a greater sort of pacified consuming sort of a role when they're in those kind of spaces as a result.Barry: design, as philosophers would say, is teleological as a goal or end in mind and aim the aim can be awesomeness or the enhancement of social relationships of bonding and mutual appreciation or it can suck. In modern cases it can feel like blatant attempts to limit human behavior to working or shopping. The only two activities of human value that makes sense to private industries.RR: but as much as the rest of the affluent may despise open designers for works it reduce us to workers and shoppers, hostile design can have far more severe implications for the homeless and vulnerable.RA: excluded vulnerable marginal people find that there is literally no space for them in the city. Now when I was a student in London you could walk from Waterloo station to the South Bank and pass your underpasses where they were you know sort of cavernous places underneath the arches where homeless people were congregate and you'd see fires and oil drums burning and people sort of keeping down for the night and so on. All that interstitial space has literally been designed out.RR: one thing that people with homes and jobs take for granted is their right to use the toilet, their right to sleep, and their right to wash themselves when they're dirty. These the most basic functions that humans need to perform to survive but these things are not in fact legal rights.Barry: in fact, if you think about it, we give wild and domesticated animals more rights than people to perform their basic bodily functions. If I walked my dog in New York City, she could go almost everywhere she chose. If I needed to use the toilet, I'd need to purchase something from a business or I'd have to get their explicit permission, which you almost never get. The philosopher Jeremy Waldron pointed out in two famous papers on homelessness that almost everything we do as people has to be done somewhere in some place, and in the modern society there are two kinds of places: public places and private places.RR: when I privately owned a space no one has the rights the use of my private property without my permission, you have no freedom to use my private spaces even if you desperately need them for your basic human functions like sleeping. Homeless people don't have any such private property. Those of us who have rights to private property have at least one place where we can perform these basic functions, we are free to sleep in our homes, and our freedom to sleep in our homes is not dependent on the will of others to let us do this. Homeless people don't have freedoms like this, there's no that they have the right to sleep, and so there's no word that they are free to sleep that isn't dependent on the will of others to let them sleep. Unless, the homeless have the freedom to sleep in public.Barry: what hosilel design does is create an environment that makes it impossible for the home to perform the most basic acts of human functioning in the only spaces they are legally allowed to do it. What these designs do is make privately-owned spaces the only ones where a person can perform the basic functions that are needed for human beings to survive. A city that employs hostile design makes it so that the freedom to sleep, wash, and use the toilet must always be purchased.RR: Waldron calls this and I quote, “The most callous and tyrannical exercises of power in modern times by a rich and complacent majority against a minority of their less fortunate human beings.” Waldron was talking about legislating to prevent sleeping your urination in public spaces. These kind of laws in effect deny people the kind of freedom that a human being needs to survive.Barry: in many ways hostile design can be more insidious than legislation. With legislation people can still physically sleep or urinate, they simply face potential legal repercussions. With hostile design you are using the power of the state to make the environment itself deny a person the ability to do the simplest things they need to prevent their own suffering. It's a way that the state is treating human beings as a vermin. City life is normally built around preventing wild animals from performing their life function in a way that intrudes on the desires of humans. Almost every construction in the city is hostile to the survival of local wildlife. We are now designing our cities to be hostile to people.RR: there's obviously another side to this problem. The taxpaying public wishes to use public spaces in certain ways that the homeless, skaters, and loiterers threaten, and these members of society seem to have as much of a right to public space as the others. Why isn't hostile design the least evil and least costly solution to a genuine problem?Barry: Waldron sees an analogy between the problem of homelessness and the problem of free speech. People find the homeless, skaters, and loiterers threatening and offensive, but so too do people find speech that they seriously disagree with offensive. The correct response in the case of free speech in a liberal society is to welcome and value it, and to learn from it, not to erect barriers to its expression. In the case of homeless people openly sleeping or begging on the street, people who find it offensive should be grateful that they're made aware of a social problem that they're in a position to solve. The problem is not that there are offensive people on the street, but that there are problems of poverty and mental health. But still, ordinary citizens claim a right to use public space in the ways that they see fit, and skating, panhandling, and loitering seem to preclude them. What's wrong with empowering tax paying citizens from taking control of the streets?RR: you can actually view it two ways: you can design a space in the interest of those who pay, these are the people who own private property and pay taxes that go to the maintenance of public places. This way of looking at the ethics of design puts the rights of those who pay over the rights of those who don't, and that's a question that goes to the very heart of what it means to be a public space. If you think that public spaces are just another space that privileges owners of private spaces and private property. Then in what sense are they public? Rather than just an extension of private property rights, the more you have privately the more your right to determine the public space.RR: but although Waldron thinks that it's natural to design public spaces to be the complement of private spaces, public spaces might need to serve the interests of those who don't have private spaces of their own too. Homeless people without private spaces need some public space in order to perform the basic functions that we all need to survive.Barry: the lesson from Waldron is that those of us who never have to worry about where to sleep, where to wash, and where to use the toilet, should understand that these are actually privileges we've purchased in private spaces. If there aren't publicly available spaces for these activities, we aren't actually free to do these things until we've purchased the space where we do it. The more hostile design we permit in our environment or the more laws we passed to prohibit behavior, the more we are limiting our freedom in public spaces and for many people this is not a nuisance or something that just sucks, it's a matter of survival. Richard Rowland is a philosopher at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. Nick Riggle’s book is On Being Awesome: the unified theory of how not to suck, and it's out now on Penguin Books go to for links to Leah Borromeo’s Space, Not Spikes exhibit and for Jeremy Waldron's papers on homelessness. This episode was inspired by an episode on hostel design but they did over at 99% Invisible, a podcast about design. ................
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