Defensive Designs: What can designers do when designs turn hostile?

In defense of defensive designs

The year is 1973.

The city is New York.

Architect Oscar Newman makes a breakthrough discovery comparing two New York social housing projects & unraveling the idea that physical space design does, in fact, influence criminal behavior.

Newman argues that architectural and environmental design plays an essential part in increasing or reducing criminality. In his detailed study he found that people in high rise felt lesser control & lesser personal responsibility for an area occupied by so many people, in contrast to those in low rise buildings.

As a result, high rise buildings see a high rise in crimes.

And thus began a whirlpool of widespread transformations in urban design where social control, crime prevention, & even public health came under the purview of community design.

In Newman’s book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, defensible space is defined as a

“A residential environment whose physical characteristics—building layout and site plan—function to allow inhabitants themselves to become key agents in ensuring their security.”

Aka, defensible space is not just a physical space or layout.

It’s a socio-physical phenomenon.

He was a proponent of the opinion that an area is deemed safe by its inhabitants when they feel a sense of ownership & responsibility.

A criminal feels isolated when his turf is removed.

If an intruder can sense an involved & watchful community, he will feel reluctant in committing the crime. The idea is that crime and delinquency can be controlled and mitigated through environmental design.

While this was a scientific & well-intentioned study with a groundbreaking revelation, that did help in deter crime rates through socio-physical urban design, an unwanted repercussion of this movement in design was the rise of “hostile designs”.

Making cities safer ; but for whom? Thoughts on defensive architecture

The good thing about Newman’s design discovery was that now more & more architects were coming up with city & residential space designs that would invoke a sense of ownership & thus security.

The bad & the ugly thing about Newman’s design discovery was that this powerful concept probably landed in the hands of those who strictly viewed public spaces as something to be owned & used by a certain class of people.

The well-to-do, non-homeless, tax-paying class of people.

The fight against crime through environmental design went too far & was reborn as “hostile” design – unfriendly, non-welcoming, plain-old rude design elements that make public spaces inhospitable to all.

The use of metal studs or bolts to break up smooth surfaces to discourage skateboarders is a classic example of this. In some countries, spikes have been installed in places where people (especially the homeless) tend to sleep rough.

An extreme example of this is the idea of coin-operated benches with retractable spikes.

Designs range in scale and type and are generally employed to prevent skateboarding, parkour, littering, loitering, and public urination, among other ‘anti-social’ behavior.

When defense turns hostile: The bane of defensive designs

From excessively cobbled pavements to spikes anywhere homeless people can sleep, hostile design elements, under the safe façade of “defensive designs”, are now dominating our public spaces. Such aggressive design measures, with the intention of curbing anti-social behavior & crime, are a hot topic for debate.

Proponents of “defensive design” claim their right to implement some level of “paternalistic libertarianism” for the greater good of the society.

In simple words, they believe that slight nudges across public space designs such as barricades, spikes, cobbled pavements & the likes, though lean towards undesirable or plain uncomfortable, tend to do more good than discomfort. These prevent loitering, sleeping on public benches, & seeking shelter at places which are not supposed to be treated thus.

On the other hand, those who dismiss hostility in design in public spaces are of the opinion that this design philosophy is highly militaristic in nature & imply the existence of a war against unanticipated use.

Qualified as inherently aggressive, defensive designs are now being regarded as distressing since these largely inhibit comfort in the outdoors & more often than not premeditated towards a certain section of the society – the homeless.

The design thinking that goes into creating such uncomfortable public spaces experience is to essentially deprive the majority of comfort, shelter, & security because of concerns around what may or may not happen.

A rather large & unaddressed problem at this point is who is in charge of taking the calls.

We generally have the police encouraging hostile & defensive designs for the sake of “preventing crime through environmental design”. The perspective here is one that is dominated by crime prevention, surveillance, control, & territorial enforcement. Something that is light years away from the perspective of urban designers, architects, city planners, & the likes – who think in terms of usability, convenience, comfort, aesthetics, & so on.

When design turns hostile, who is to be blamed?
Defensive Home Designs

A solution can be deemed successful or feasible if the benefits outweigh the adverse effects.

In case of defensive designs, sadly, this has not been the case.

While barricades on benches & spikes in the pathways, & weirdly inclined “leaning bars” might be hindering homeless people to seek shelter, what these are also simultaneously doing is create major issues for senior citizens, disabled, pregnant women, children, and those who are physically unfit.

Not to mention, these hostile design structures tend to deflect actual responsibilities from dealing with the core issues at hand here – social & economical issues that give rise to homelessness.

When you install spikes, barricades, cobbled pavements & so on, what you are actually emphasizing is that yes there is a problem, yes there are homeless people who need shelter & space, but no, this is NOT our responsibility.

With every installation of such hostile design elements across subways, parks, railway stations, pavements, public transportation, etc, the core problem is just being passed around from one system to another, where collectively shirking off responsibility is the only thing happening in the name of crime prevention.

Toyota & the system of 5 whys: Unschooling defensive designs

When Sakichi Toyoda formulated the legendary “5 whys” technique to get to the bottom of the problems across Toyota manufacturing units, he unwittingly opened the portals to effective solutioneering which is now made a part of Kaizen, Lean Manufacturing, & Six Sigma.

This process is as simple as it sounds. To every problem statement you must ask why, 5 times. By asking the “why” again & again, you are peeling off layers from the root cause of the problem, only to reveal it through repeated questioning.

You can always take it to 6th or 7th level, but usually magic happens at why #5.

The key here is to avoid assumptions & logic traps & get to the bottom of the things asap.

The 5 Whys method was developed to work back to a root cause of a mechanical problem by a total of five removes.