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Part 1: Viewing Injustice through a Theological Lens
Human dignity and care for creation are intrinsically tied to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and are often considered two of the most prevalent examples of social justice within CST. However, to understand the role they play within CST and the church, one must understand what “justice” even is. With influence from historical accounts, justice can be defined as a constant drive towards equity and fairness for all forms of life, including people, wildlife, and nature.
The seeds of these concepts are sowed in the Bible’s earliest chapters of Genesis, the most relevant examples being in Genesis 1 and 2. Its story chronicles the theological belief surrounding the creation of the world and all that exists within it, following a seven day period in which land, animals, and man are created. Specifically, in Genesis 1:26, God proclaims, “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth,” and in Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.” Both of these verses highlight the responsibility granted to humanity of being stewards of the Earth, an idea that permeates the entirety of Genesis.
However, these teachings of care for creation are not limited to the Old Testament. In fact, Jesus frequently revisits this notion, regarding it as the “greatest commandment” in multiple accounts. In Mark 12:28-33, He proclaims that the first and foremost commandment is to love God with all you have, and that the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Without these, no other doctrine mattered. This not only supports the Catholic social teaching of care for creation as a whole, but the responsibility to honor the dignity we as humans owe each other – that which is fundamentally given to man through creation.
Catholic social teaching and its dedication to social justice concentrates on the respect of human dignity and care for creation above all else, and it is clear that hostile architecture, in all its forms of use, is adversarial to this. Throughout history, entire civilizations have been built on the principle that structures are meant to serve those within. You can look at forms of government like democracy as an example, something specially designed to have the people’s interest in mind. Yet, the most forgotten form of serving structures that exist in every single civilization is the literal structures– the architecture. Architecture can be defined as the study and design of the spaces that humans exist in, and hostile architecture can be defined as the intentional use of design to exclude certain groups of people from spaces that should be universal. If architecture is meant to be a structure to serve the people within, then hostile architecture aims to circumvent this role through discriminatory means. It not only excludes the targeted group of individuals from what should be considered public spaces, but it also excludes wildlife and other marginalized groups.
Nowadays, hostile architecture is most often directed towards the homeless, with nearly eight hundred thousand people in the US being recorded without homes in 2024 alone. Yet, its history of use stems from the civil rights movement and segregation; according to the Single Homeless Project, “In the mid-20th century, [Robert] Moses designed a section of the Southern State Parkway in Long Island with low-hanging bridges – deliberately too low for buses to pass under. The goal? To prevent poorer, mostly Black New Yorkers – who relied on public transport – from reaching the beaches of Long Island.” This is just one example of how hostile architecture shifted from its use in deterring public indecency – as it was initially used in 19th century Europe with features like “urine deflectors” – to a tool for the segregation of black and lower-class Americans from wealthy, white Americans.
A world-renowned example of human-centric design is the city of Barcelona, designed in large part by the architect Antoni Gaudí. A man of deep philosophy, Gaudí believed “God created Nature and everything in it as perfect,” and thus, “His entire life [seemed] to be dedicated to materializing his love for his God.” His creations stretched from quaint city streets to extravagant chapels, all embodying his beliefs around the natural order of our world as God created it. In fact, Gaudí’s magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia church, was the final and greatest embodiment of his devotion to God. In an interview, Gaudí himself said, “The expiatory church of La Sagrada Família is made by the people and is mirrored in them. It is a work that is in the hands of God and the will of the people.” La Sagrada Familia and Barcelona in its entirety are odes not just to God, but to man’s place in God’s epic of creation; their masterfully planned infrastructure and beautifully crafted architecture prioritize the human experience while preserving the very essence of nature as Gaudí believed God intended, never once intentionally excluding specific groups of people. After all, nothing created in God’s image can exclude the very image of God: humanity.
Part 2: Viewing Injustice Through a Socio-Historical Lens
As previously stated, hostile architecture is the intentional use of design to exclude certain groups of people or actions from public spaces. Yet, its sphere of impact stretches far beyond the intended target. In many cases, marginalized and even average individuals are subjected to the effects of hostile architecture. For some, this can be a minor inconvenience, but for others, it can create major challenges that must be overcome in order to simply exist in a public space. It may be difficult to recognize hostile architecture in daily life, as it is intentionally masked as a regular, if not flawed, design choice. However, things as simple as a lack of outdoor seating or shade from sunlight can be examples of hostile architecture– in such scenarios, it is the absence of a structure that is hostile, as it is often meant to prevent consumers from staying near one business for too long and keep the flow of traffic moving through an establishment.
The groups most strongly affected by hostile architecture (outside of the typically targeted group of homeless people) are those with disabilities, followed by elderly and pregnant people. Whether it’s a lack of seating and shade or the intentionally hard-to-reach accessibility zones, all of these groups face difficulties existing in public spaces. Even the most average individuals like able bodied young people face the results of this damaging design choice, and while it may be difficult to notice the physical architecture, it is not difficult to recognize its harmful effects.
Hostile architecture is not meant to be obvious. Rather, it is meant to be hidden from the public eye, just like the roots of the issues hostile architecture intends to bury. However, one of the most prevalent forms of hostile architecture in the US and across the world is the excessive construction of major roadways, particularly in cities. A study from the International Journal of Health Geographics found that a large percentage of pedestrians no longer feel comfortable in public spaces due to issues of overcrowding from both people and motor vehicles:
The results suggest that parked vehicles and bicycles in pedestrian areas with limited walking space may increase the physiological stress response… we found that most of the reported stressful events occurred in the transit space near the city centre and the roadside commercial space, where the large human crowds, parked bicycles and vehicles coexist.
Other studies from as far back as 2008 found that the dependency society has formed on cars has become detrimental to both the physical and mental wellbeing of civilians, and that corporations and commodities such as cafes or shopping establishments are a large part of the issue. This is the primary way in which all members of the public are subjected to hostile architecture in the US, as there are a staggeringly small number of walkable cities and even suburban communities. Because cars are necessary to access public spaces, those who cannot drive or afford a car are excluded from them, and because cars need somewhere to sit when not in use, public spaces have become dominated by massive fields of burning hot asphalt that are torturous to traverse. Still, all of this data ignores the safety concerns that come with cars overtaking pedestrian spaces and the ensuing anxiety that motivates people to stay away from public spaces. The mass exodus of people away from public spaces is harmful for both the economy of local businesses and the general health of the public, as these establishments end up receiving less long-term business while more of the population face health deficits.
There are many reasons for the use of hostile architecture today, but the two most frequent goals are to shield the public eye from local issues regarding things like homelessness and to promote the business of major automotive companies. Historically, automobiles were seen as evil and a threat to public safety, and one of the ways major corporations tried to capitalize on this was the General Motor streetcar conspiracy, in which General Motors along with other major motor companies in the US schemed to monopolize and sell the production of all buses to National City Lines– a plot that was and still is highly illegal due to the Sherman Antitrust Act. In this instance, it is important to understand the definition of a conspiracy as a secret plan by a particular group to do something harmful or illegal, and not an unfounded public belief. The unpredicted outcome of the ensuing lawsuit was the boom in automobile sales across the US, as public transportation faced many physical and financial damages after the conspiracy and Henry Ford’s implementation of the assembly line made automobiles and factory work appear as the height of industry advancements.
Despite their boom in popularity during the 1920s, cars were still viewed rather negatively in the public eye, but with their increased power as a result of the lawsuit against General Motors, major automobile manufacturers like Ford managed to win over city planners and create the car centric city plan seen across the country today. Because the United States is incredibly new on the global stage, cities were able to be built up during the second industrial revolution with cars at the forefront of technological advancements. However, the power these companies hold over city planners, local governments, and the economy only grew, resulting in the over-dependence on cars seen today and the lack of pedestrian-friendly cities.
A large struggle surrounding this injustice is the moral dilemma placed upon architects and planners who depend on commissions; a majority of architects and architecture firms work on a contract system, meaning that when there is a client willing to commission a project, there’s money. However, it is not remaining consistent on design ethics that pleases clients. Rather, it is fulfilling their desires no matter the cost, which often comes at the price of the designer’s moral profile. It is incredibly difficult for architects to get paid for their work, and most individuals in the field are severely underpaid. While the average income of an architect in the United States is around ninety-six thousand dollars a year, the extreme amount of fees and difficulties with clients often cause this number to drastically dwindle. In such situations, it should be noted that there are both direct and indirect power holders. On one hand, there are the corporations and local governments with large budgets that employ architects to implement hostile designs. On the other hand, there are the architects who take these jobs. Of course, everyone needs to make a living, and in some cases these design choices are unavoidable for an architect because of their contract. However, it is important to remember that they hold a significant amount of power in this issue through the value of their skills, and they could potentially turn down a project if they are asked to design a hostile structure. Still, the main perpetrators of the issue are those with the power and budget to alter public spaces.
In order for hostile architecture to manifest– especially on the large scale that it does within the United States– there must be systems in place that perpetuate ideologies that support its development. As mentioned previously, the two primary ideologies that hostile architecture initially exemplified were racism and classism, as the design of the Southern State Highway was intended to keep black and non-wealthy Americans out of Long Island. While these philosophies are still prevalent in the expansion of hostile architecture, another political ideology has taken over as the primary focus, that being neoliberalism. Today, neoliberalism is considered to suggest that minimal government involvement in business and labor regulations, as well as cuts on public social funding, are the key for a society living under capitalism to prosper. Understandably, this is not a typically well-liked argument. Yet, this ideology was not always viewed so negatively. As explained in an article from Studies in Comparative International Development:
The term neoliberalism was first coined by the Freiberg School of German economists to denote a philosophy that was explicitly moderate in comparison to classical liberalism… Only once the term had migrated to Latin America, and Chilean intellectuals starting using it to refer to radical economic reforms under the Pinochet dictatorship, did neoliberalism acquire negative normative connotations and cease to be used by market proponents.
In this situation, the modern and negative connotative definition of neoliberalism would be used to argue that public spaces and businesses should become more privatized in order to boost economic growth. Though the term is frequently used as a sort of buzz-word to be thrust against political opponents in academic spaces, the reality is that this ideology is incredibly prevalent within the systems of the US, regardless of whether or not it is intentional or even recognized. Recent legislation commonly referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has brought to attention the strain that national budget cuts have and will have on local governments, something that directly connects to the proliferation of hostile architecture as the privatization and exclusionary nature of public spaces only continues to increase.
Moving forward, planning and architecture firms, cities and towns, and local governments need to address the growing economic disparities in public resources. Many areas of the United States have long faced issues in public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, parks, and affordable housing, and it needs to be acknowledged that these problems will only worsen with time, especially considering the direction of the American economy and political sphere. The presence of hostile architecture will only become more imposing if nothing is done to correct its acceptance within these fields, as far too many corporations and positions of power have gotten comfortable with the exclusion and mistreatment of consumers and constituents.
Part 3: Fighting Injustice
In order to combat the injustices presented by hostile architecture, one must first examine what action has already been taken. While there have been impactful legislative changes in recent years, they do not extend beyond certain states and have yet to come into full effect. Historically, there have been few organizations that recognize this issue as an injustice and work towards its resolution. Thus, non-profit organizations are often turned to for aid in the fight against this form of hostility.
Strong Towns is a non-profit organization that works with cities and towns nationwide to redesign local infrastructure in a way that is both economically and socially sustainable. They are seeking to put an end to the “suburban experiment,” their term for the pattern of instantaneous city development that arose from post-WWII American society. Part of their mission is to create resources for local communities to educate themselves on how their cities and towns are being constructed without their best interests in mind, often due to a lack of proper communication channels and interdisciplinary insight. In an interview with Edward Erfurt, the chief technical advisor at Strong Towns, Edward said,
What I've learned is that [technical] drawings and that type of aerial view, it's like learning a language. I describe it as trying to learn Latin or Greek. We expect the public to be able to understand that… They don't have the knowledge to know if you can put a bike lane on a high-speed road or not, or if there's the right of way, the physical space to do these things… We talk about humbly observing where somebody is struggling in your community… Now, when we humbly observe, we can see where somebody is struggling in those pieces, and I train folks to [ask], “How do we put that in one sentence? What's the one thing we see?” The second component is not to hope that somebody can come in and fix that… It's to actually ask yourself, “What is the next smallest thing I could do to help ease that struggle?”
This form of dynamic participation in a community is crucial when it comes to bridging this gap in communication between the public and hired contractors.
Another non-profit organization with a similar mission to Strong Towns is the Neighborhood Design Center. According to their website, “the Neighborhood Design Center partners with residents and local leaders to envision better parks, revitalize commercial districts, develop greening strategies, and make our public spaces more vibrant, safe, and sustainable.” They have teams working on things ranging from landscaping to eco-friendly infrastructure, city planning to pedestrian accommodations. Somewhat unlike Strong Towns, the Neighborhood Design Center focuses on building a more nature-embracing environment, sometimes completely restructuring a community. Both of these organizations have had major impacts on the groups they’ve worked with, and their reach only continues to grow with their expansion. Their efforts towards fostering communication is a direct reflection of the Catholic Social Teaching that we are called to family, community, and participation, and that we all have an innate dignity that must be respected.
On the side of legislation, there has yet to be any concrete bills proposed on a federal level that would impact the issue of hostile architecture. However, there have been bills brought towards state legislatures to ban hostile design that targets unhoused individuals. For example, Bill H.3307 is the most recent revision of a bill brought towards the Massachusetts state administration by Rep. Mike Connolly to enact legislation to “prohibit the construction of publicly accessible buildings or structures designed or intended to prevent unhoused individuals from sitting or lying on the building or structure at street level.” While this bill has yet to be signed into law, Rep. Connolly’s actions have encouraged other state representatives to move forward with their own respective legislation proposals of a similar nature. Sadly, though, there has not been any other substantial, publicly-presented bills regarding matters of hostile architecture or infrastructure targeting certain groups of people.
There are even small-scale manifestations of hostile architecture in the US in the form of Home Owners’ Associations regulations. Many HOAs require residents to sign contracts restricting their freedom of design for their own homes, and they often include clauses that restrict “disruptive” activities like skateboarding, camping, or hosting large gatherings. By the definition of hostile architecture provided in this paper, these associations unequivocally perpetuate the culture society has around the acceptance of hostile design and infrastructure. Legally, HOAs are typically well within their rights to control a neighborhood as they see fit, so long as participating residents have signed a contract, but the point still stands that such constraints on human identity and expression go against many core tenets of CST (primarily that of respect for human dignity and call to family, community, and participation).
Appendix A: An Interview with Judi Barrett from Barrett Planning Group LLC
Date: December 23, 2025 | Interviewee: Judi Barrett | Interviewer: Erin Dailey
Erin: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Judi: Of course… I’m Judi Barrett, I have a small firm in Hingham– Barrett Planning Group. We have twelve employees… ten planners, an admit assistant, and someone who helps with a lot of special projects. Almost all of our clients are cities and towns… we once-in-a-while work with non-profits and state government, but our work is [primarily] in local government… We really do four main things: a lot of work in comprehensive plans– or master plans– for cities and towns; we do zoning work; we do a lot of work in affordable housing and preservation planning.
Erin: If you feel comfortable sharing, would you tell me a little bit about yourself personally?
Judi: Sure! So, I’m a 72 year old planner, hostile architecture is near and dear to me… I remember trying to take my mother, when she was in her nineties, just out to do a bit of shopping, and there would be no place for her to sit and rest between stores… so I’ve kind of experienced this… I’m certainly aware of the homelessness component of this, but it affects a lot of other populations as well. I’ve been in the field for 36 years, I really enjoy planning… sometimes clients drive me nuts when they want to do things that are perhaps not in the public’s interest.
Erin: Could you expand upon what it’s like to have to cater to a client’s decision that you believe is not in the public’s interest?
Judi: We don’t do it. I’ve actually withdrawn [offers]… It doesn't happen very often. I’ve been in this field long enough that I think when people hire us, they know what they’re getting, but earlier in my career there were a couple occasions where I had to withdraw from a project– and I would not be hostile about it, I would certainly arrange for someone else to take over the project; you don’t want to not help people… I’ve just learned the hard way– in life and in business– that if there’s something that you just know is wrong, you just don’t do it.
Erin: And do you have any examples that you could share that would reflect these decisions that [clients] have made?
Judi: Yeah, I worked on a couple of zoning projects where the towns were intentionally putting bedroom restrictions on housing units to keep families with children out… and that’s a fair housing violation, and I won’t do it… I’d just tell them I’m not gonna do it.
Erin: By your consideration [and experience], would you consider that to be hostile architecture?
Judi: That’s a really good question… I guess in a way it is; I think of hostile architecture as something in the public sphere, because that’s really where the disincentives tend to be, but actually, you raise a good point, Erin. I think designing a building to keep certain people out is hostile… I just never thought of it that way.
Erin: I’m not sure if you’re aware of some of [hostile architecture’s] historical use cases, but a lot of them were intentional separations of lower class and black Americans…
Judi: Oh yeah, and frankly, you can see a lot of those patterns in today’s zoning maps. Those lines that were drawn a long time ago persist, and now they’re legally ensconced in the ground through zoning decisions… Most of my practice is really around the issues of homelessness because it’s just so in-your-face.
Erin: On that note, could you expand upon your work relating to homelessness?
Judi: When we work with non-profits, it tends to be around homelessness. We’ve worked with a couple of agencies that were trying to do what’s called a comprehensive housing resource center, where you might have emergency shelter, but you also have offices and community rooms where there are ways for people who are experiencing homelessness to get access to housing services, subsidies, assistance, counseling, and so-forth, and then also connected to that would be [something] like permanent supportive housing– transitional housing. So, they’re like comprehensive housing resource centers.
Erin: Before, you mentioned that you had, in a few instances, pulled out of a few projects. How difficult do you find it to redirect a client’s [decision] in regards to some of these [hostile] choices?
Judi: I think if you were asking me this question 35 years ago, I probably would have said it’s really hard… I don’t find it so hard today, I think because it’s just a little easier when you’re old to put your foot down. I’m being very blunt with you, I just don’t take certain projects, and I think people know that now, so I’m not somebody who’s gonna be hired by a town that’s trying to figure out how to construct legal barriers to multi-family housing; I am not a consultant that’s gonna be hired by a town that’s trying to fight a homeless shelter– they just don’t come to us.
Erin: And so, do you think this is something that’s more difficult for someone that’s more new or just younger in the industry?
Judi: Probably… and it’s not that people who are young don’t have a well laid-out value system, I just think it’s hard. You’re trying to anchor yourself in a field, trying to work… typically, you’ve gone through college and graduate school and you’ve got expenses, and you don’t want to burn a lot of bridges… and I do get that, because I certainly didn’t want to burn a lot of bridges either. I just think, no matter what field we’re in, you come to this place in life where you have to say, “Some things are just wrong and I’m not gonna do them.” It's not that I’m Pollyanna (excessively blind or optimistic) about it, I’m just not gonna do it.
Erin: Not just within your line of work, but in the general sphere of architecture… on average, how often do you take note of hostile architecture around you?
Judi: Everyday. I see it everywhere… y’know, hostile architecture can be anything– the obvious things like the benches someone can’t lie down on or the spikes under a bridge– but there’s a hostility that is built into zoning decisions that spread out housing, that disconnect people from goods and services… and make it hard for them to access things that they need… that comes about from favoring a vehicle-oriented culture. Those are hostile acts, they just happen to be manifested in zoning– and there are other related policy decisions that get made around the infrastructure that supports that sort of land-use pattern. I think one of the most hostile things we ever did in planning and design– and I hope you don’t live on one of these streets– but it’s the cul de sac. It’s like we’ve separated neighborhoods… you have this little development with a bubble at the end of it, and it looks like you’re creating a nice little neighborhood, but in fact, you’re separating people from everybody around them… and you’re creating a traffic nightmare!
Judi: One of the best examples of hostile architecture of that vein [referring to a discussion about over-dependency on cars] is a story that’s told by Charles Marrone, who’s the founder of Strong Towns… in Springfield, MA, there’s a big four-lane road that enters the city that has been improved to get vehicles into Springfield… The public library is on one side of the road. There is no parking at this library; the parking lot is on the other side of this four-lane road. The city painted crosswalks at nearby intersections, but no one is gonna walk down to the crosswalk, cross the street, and walk all the way back to the library… and a child was killed there, several years ago when Marrone was called to the Springfield to consult with the city about how to improve pedestrian access in this area. He said, “Well, you need to put the crosswalk right across from the library,” but the city didn’t want to do that because it will slow down traffic. There have been at least two other deaths in that same location [since]. We make these choices to accommodate vehicles, and I get why, but it’s really an act of hostility toward public health and safety.
Erin: Going forward, what future do you see for hostile architecture within cities? Do you think we’re moving in a direction that might negate some of these design choices, or do you think it’s going “full throttle?”
Judi: I think in cities where you tend to have a higher-end market, you will see this problem probably trending away because those communities are very into new-urbanism– which, I must say, new-urbanism has had its own issues with hostile architecture, not the least of which is impedimous to disability access. However, it’s the communities that are struggling with the disproportionate impact of homelessness that I think you’re going to see the greatest resistance to change, because they’re throwing their hands up and they don’t really know what to do… There already wasn’t enough help coming from federal funding, and we’re going to see that even worse now, so I worry about the communities where they kind of say, “Well we’re welcoming everybody, look at our really cool downtown, look at our neighborhood centers, look at all this great design…” [because] they’re not necessarily one of the places where a lot of people experience homelessness. They [homeless people] are in our poorer, lower income neighborhoods, and I think it’s a tougher challenge for them, yet do you really want a place where a senior citizen can’t sit down? I don’t think so, but that’s kind of what they’re doing.
Erin: What are some ways that you think as individuals we can give feedback to local governments that you think would be impactful?
Judi: There’s nothing more powerful than being at a public hearing and speaking up– and people laugh at me when I say this, but it’s true– because, for the most part, the public agencies that are making decisions about these things are hearing from folks who are mad about something [i.e. a homeless shelter or more accessible design choices], who don’t want a “problem” in their backyard. They rarely hear from people who are talking about an equitable way to design our town centers, our neighborhood centers… so I think public testimony is important and that active journalism is effective, too– at least making sure the public understands what the issue is.
End of transcript.
Appendix B: An Interview with Edward Erfurt from Strong Towns
Date: December 23, 2025 | Interviewee: Edward Erfurt | Interviewer: Erin Dailey
Erin: All right. So to jump right in, could you tell me about your position at Strong Towns and what it is you do with them?
Edward: Yeah, I am the chief technical advisor for Strong Towns, which is a really fancy term for somebody that has a lot of professional experience. So for the last 20 years, 30 years, I've been working out in the public and private sector. The work I do at Strong Towns is bringing that technical expertise into our organization for advocacy, and I specifically work with local governments, our members, our local conversations when they explore the Strong Towns ideas and they begin to implement them locally– I work with them on that implementation. So if they struggle on something, if they need help navigating as a coach, that's the work I do. I'm kind of a fancy life coach when it comes to implementing the Strong Towns approach.
Erin: And how did you end up working for Strong Towns?
Edward: The really short story is that I met Chuck [Strong Towns] in 2010, just as he was getting the blog going for Strong Towns and when Strong Towns became a not-for-profit. We were both kind of in the same realm of how we were seeing the world, that not everything added up in the way that was projected. That's kind of the suburban experiment, the way we were doing buildings. They were not fulfilling the promises that they had been set forward to do. We met and became really good friends, and every city I worked in, I would invite Chuck to come to town to share Strong Towns. I was using all of those techniques and principles and ideas in the towns and cities I was working in, and I was seeing really incredible feedback loops on that, where we would apply that and we'd become stronger and more resilient. A little over three years ago, after many, many years of us trying to figure out how we could work together, a position opened up in Strong Towns that would allow me to join and be part of the not-for-profit organization. So I just became really lucky with the opportunity to come work at Strong Towns. But my journey is from 2010 to now, really kind of applying that in the real world and listening to what Chuck had to say, giving him feedback on what I was seeing on the ground and implementing these ideas.
Erin: Interesting to hear. So I don't know how much you were able to glean from my [Google] form request. Would you like me to give you a quick rundown of what my social justice project is, or do you think you have an understanding?
Edward: I would love to hear it in your own words. I read through it. I thought it was really amazing, but I think it's always helpful if I can hear it from you, and then we'll go from there.
Erin: Of course, like I said in my form request, every senior at Fontbonne is required to complete a social justice project. Over the course of our senior year, you obviously pick a project, and that work starts in junior year, but by senior year, we have a 20-page paper that you complete across the year. At the end of the year, we have our social justice fair, and that is where we display our action plans– and everyone's looks a little different. For my project, I, of course, chose the impacts and cultural implications of hostile architecture. The four main parts of our paper are observing the injustice through a theological lens, because we are a school of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The second part is viewing the injustice through a socio-historical lens. Third, and where we are right now in the year, is observing what has been done to better the injustice or to combat it in the past, and the fourth part is both a reflection and kind of like a direction that other people can take going forward with the action plan. So as I have defined hostile architecture for the purpose of my project, I have defined it as the intentional use of design to exclude certain people or actions from public spaces. So that is the overarching gist of my project.
Edward: No, that's great. I mean, for me, I started out in architecture school, and before I went to architecture school, I was looking at traditional patterns of architecture. I was really, all my summer vacations, everywhere my parents had dragged me to, I was looking at all of these traditional patterns– things that had lasted the test of time, things that were rooted back in various types of histories– and I lasted because a tradition moved forward. Every generation pulled those pieces forward. And when I went to architecture school, or when I was looking for architecture school, I found that very few architecture schools taught that, almost none. And they were teaching architects to do all different types of crazy things. They were teaching architects how to form their identity in the world and impress that on others. And I was like, that's not the way cities work. That's not the way traditions work. There's a missing piece here.
Edward: In school, I met a bunch of architects that believed in traditional patterns and celebrating that and how to do the construction, and then I got introduced to urban design, where I saw that's where the real issues were occurring, because in a building, we can say, okay, that building's rough, brutalist… It doesn't fit in, but it's like one building of all the others. But then I started to look and see all across North America, places that have been completely raised. Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed in the name of progress, in the name of redoing design. And then I looked at buildings, and there are buildings around the world that were being built that we were forcing people to move into, and it was like no social interaction, none of the types of things to embrace what we fundamentally need as humans.
Edward: That's where my journey got into looking at those traditional patterns, and as I dove into that and did professional work, you could see that on the urban landscape. I'd go to cities, well-intentioned public housing, well-intentioned freeway projects, well-intentioned park projects. All these things would happen, but all at the expense of a community. Or you'd go in and they would try to do something that was intended to be better for a community, and it was totally devoid of all of the human things that we need, people coming together, building community. Then we get in these cycles and we wonder why these communities fall apart. They're no longer communities, it's just a group of people. Crime goes up. Graffiti goes up. All life leaves at that point. So the work that I've been doing really is my professional career, stitching that back together, trying to undo that so we can embrace who we are as humans and celebrate that and not try to force what somebody in a textbook thinks is the best thing to do.
Erin: Yes, and if you don't mind me asking, where did you study?
Edward: I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Miami down in Coral Gables. I got a bachelor's of architecture. My mom's still upset that I'm not an architect because we did all that. I then went and got a master's degree at the University of Notre Dame in architectural design and urbanism… I couldn't get enough in school; I had to go and get that extra degree, I had to go do all the things. But for me, that educational background reinforced what I had observed as a child and helped put that in a construct. In school, you get the ability to look at the full length of time, so I could look at those pieces and I could meet other professionals that were doing this work.
Edward: When I started college, when I enrolled in 1997, the idea of traditional architecture and traditional town planning and mixed income and mixed use buildings, that was like cutting edge. The fact that people would want to not live next to each other and not have a buffer between them or that people would actually walk, like that was unheard of at the time. And it's hard to believe. I go places now and we're returning back to things that are really more familiar to us. And we're realizing that we've created our own barriers in this. Every zoning code I read, there are things that we adopt and throw on ourselves that's counter to who we are as regular people.
Erin: You work with Strong Towns currently, but before that, when you were not just a student, but even younger, how often did you notice hostile architecture around you?
Edward: All the time. All the time. One of the schools I went to explore that I got accepted to and was at the time like one of these great schools was the University of Cincinnati. We were running late for that kind of interview with the dean, so my parents were driving, they're like, “Just jump out. There's the door, go in and you'll be able to get ahead of us.” My parents would go park the car and meet us inside. I got out, the door barely opened to the building. I got in and I got completely lost in the building. After 15 minutes, I hear my name from the heavens because my parents had parked in the garage and had walked straight in. They met the dean and they were above me, overlooking the central space, giving me directions of how to get upstairs. And I felt so little and so embarrassed. That here I'm like a functioning person, maybe not quite an adult, but like I couldn't figure out how to get to the building.
Edward: When I go and I work in downtowns… I've done a lot of work with freeway teardowns and trying to heal those pieces, and you go and you read the history. Like why was the highway put at this location through the middle of the downtown? You start to read all of the things, the negative things about the people that were in that neighborhood and how that type of lifestyle or race or activities needed to be basically erased from the community… I liked traditional buildings because there were things that I could relate to. I knew I was in different places when I saw traditional buildings. When I go and see a lot of the architecture today, there's architecture that's out there that is intentionally rough on the outside, the brutalist architecture, or it's concrete, the materials that are not natural to an area, windows placed in odd places so you can't see in or out. Like I would observe this everywhere in built environments. I do a lot of drawing to help educate folks and let them see the world differently. There are many places where we create hostile environments for pedestrians. So not the desired path. We go and we put up fencing and barriers and bollards and signage and all these things that make people go around the block to cross the street. That's the type of stuff I see that I just get so angry about because it doesn't have to be that way. We have thousands of years of history of traditional building, traditional planning. Well, we were able to figure out how all of this stuff works. And some of it is blatantly intended, and other times, it's just we don't know– we just are repeating a pattern. Breaking those cycles is something I really try to strive to target and attack.
Edward: I very much sympathize with the frustration around how inherently hostile a lot of modern architecture is, because you would think if we're meant to be progressing and moving forward as a society, that would make things less confusing and more accessible. But obviously, the contrary proves to be true more often.
Edward: Even embracing, like when we think about the core things that we need as humans, the fact that we would separate meeting spaces and shopping spaces, or that we would omit areas like religious locations in a downtown. The thing that nobody has been able to fully explain to me in a way that makes rational sense are things like cemeteries. So if we look at all of our old towns, all of our churches had cemeteries around them or under them. But now in the wisdom that we have in the future, that's a bad thing, so we have to separate this stuff out, and it makes it difficult for folks when you think about all of that. We're separating out that whole cycle of life. I watch the cemeteries on the edge of town is where people take their dogs to walk and they put signs up not to do that. The ones in the middle of town get taken care of every Sunday. Somebody goes out and cleans those things up. They remember all of the individuals that were there. There's a connection to it. So yeah, it's even stuff like that, that it'd be different if they said, we learned in history that the sewage plant needs to be downstream of the water intake. That I get. We don't want to build the city in a tidal basin that's going to flood. That I get. We've learned those things, but some of this stuff, we've just self-imposed restrictions on ourselves. Yeah.
Erin: Now that you've been working at Strong Towns, what have been some of your most memorable or even just favorite ways in which cities and towns manage to change their infrastructure to benefit the people?
Edward: Yeah, what's interesting is we've been doing a lot, or I've been doing lots of work with cities and helping people think differently, and one of the cities I worked with, and it was a two-year engagement with the community, was in Medicine Hat up in Alberta, Canada. This is a city that was the embodiment of what at Strong Towns we call the growth Ponzi scheme; if we just do expansive growth out, eventually we will make up on all of our losses. And what we found at Strong Towns is the wealth we build up in cities and the suburban development pattern, it relies on continually growing. We need all of those new transactions to fund all of our promises. And unfortunately, we can never keep up with that. There's only so much land to go out. And Medicine Hat, they're really, really smart people in that city. The planners are well-respected, the utility people are well-respected, the council listens patiently at the meetings from all the technical folks sharing these pieces… For them, they thought they were doing all the right things. When budgets got tight, they cut all of the public services; they stopped the buses, they closed the parks, they fired all the city staff, but they continued to advance growth. After they did all the cutting they could and doubled down on growth, they found after a year and a half, they'd made the wrong decision because they were in an even deeper hole and residents were demanding more… it was neat really working with that community because when initially everybody was kind of resistant on the idea that we were sharing at Strong Towns, they didn't believe all the numbers that we were showing them about where their fiscal health was and where they were actually spending money in the city because they had a lot of preconceived ideas of what was happening. But when we started talking to them and asking them questions, they started to ask themselves even more questions, and what I saw there is after doing that in our short time, interesting things occurred. The city restructured itself– so from a management side, how do they actually work as a city to invest in the areas they want to invest in? They stopped targeting outward expansion– so economic development wasn't going after the factories, it was going after how do we get the coffee shop and the bar and the housing in the middle of the downtown because they could see a return on that. For utilities, they were no longer fighting City Hall about expansive utility expansion. They were talking about how they could prepare things in the middle of downtown and make it easier for people to live and develop in their core downtown areas. In their budgets, the budget hearings, staff would show up and say, here are all the things you want. These are the things we as a community cannot afford. These are the things that are on the list. The extra swimming pool we cannot afford. We can put in the budget. We can go print money, but we can't afford it. That led to them completely redoing their entire budget. So that type of transformative work, what it did is it took the pressure off the edges. It focused people in downtown, underserved communities.
Edward: One of the things that happened just before we had gotten there, the city had become one of the first cities in North America to solve homelessness. So they did a survey of all the people in town. They got them all into shelters and housing and got them all on the right track. They announced this, and then they won't say it, I will. Other jurisdictions bussed people in to solve that. So, “Oh, you solved it? Well, here, you can help share our burden.” They were then in the process, the planners, all really well-intentioned, identified the plot of land to build the next kind of affordable shelter housing in town. And it was the site, the city owned it. It was a site where they had gone through a whole bunch of discussion with a whole bunch of people, really well-intentioned. This is the site that needs to go, ready to build it, got the money to do it… Nobody actually talked to the social workers or the residents that would live in that housing. So even though the land was free, it was adjacent to the industrial yards used by the city to maintain their vehicles. It was not near a bus line, so everybody in that community would have to buy a car. If you can't afford shelter, you can't do that. It was again, all these well-intentioned things, but they forgot to ask the users about what their real needs would be.
Edward: That's the type of stuff that we were able to walk through with them and help them think differently. So the next housing project they're working on, they're asking questions, not like, “do we have water and sewer,” it's, “do we have social services for people here? Could they get to the social services we have that exist in the city? Do we have transit options that don't require a car? They can get on a bus, they can ride a bike… Are we near an employment center? So can we get people to jobs so they can begin to build up? And then are they adjacent to others?” Because we want to build a community, not like a ghetto. We want to be able to get people so that they can interact with others to help build and strengthen their community. So instead of being by the industrial yard, are we near a neighborhood that we can connect to, that this can be an extension of that neighborhood?
Edward: It's more than just an outsider coming in and helping them through that. It's really going through the entire thought process in users. What are the overall consequences of our choices? How can we make smaller choices so that if we fail, we can learn from it and not collapse the system that we can go and build off of that?
Erin: Yeah, and what I'm hearing from you, what I've heard from others, and things I've observed going to or taking architecture classes– obviously, I'm only a high school senior, but I was able to do some college programs– is that one of the biggest issues is a disconnect in communication. And it's not just between people who are in the design and planning field. It is between members and residents who those designers and planners are meant to serve. But I also am hearing a lot of disconnect at the educational level, and so on all of these spheres, wherever you feel you can best speak to, what advice or even just statements could you give to help bridge this gap?
Edward: Yeah. There is a broken system of public engagement when we're talking about decisions within our communities, and it's more than just “government's bad.” Our public engagement process– and Strong Towns, we have a couple articles on it about public engagement is worthless and then a follow-up says public engagement is worse than worthless– if you participate in a public engagement process, like let's say your community has the opportunity to add new sidewalks and bike trails in the community, you hire consultants that are experts in bicycle infrastructure and sidewalk infrastructure. They understand grades and drainage, they understand traffic, they have detailed maps of where all these things can fit and standards and how all that works. We ask them to go and develop plans. We then go out to the public and we ask them their opinion. In our public engagement, we require them to come to City Hall on a Tuesday night at 7 p.m. Sometimes we entice them with food. We show them plans. When you look at building plans or engineering plans, even my wife and I battle over Google Earth. I like to see the aerial, she likes to see the pipes, you know, like on those things…
Edward: What I've learned is that drawings and that type of aerial view, it's like learning a language. I describe it as trying to learn Latin or Greek. We expect the public to be able to understand that. We then empower them to go and give us opinions about where they think bicycle trails should go and where sidewalks should be. They don't have the knowledge to know if the street is a vertical incline and you could never get a bicycle up. They don't have the knowledge to know if you can put a bike lane on a high-speed road or not, or if there's the right of way, the physical space to do these things. And we ask our consultants to sit in the back and listen to all of this and absorb it, even though they have knowledge in these things and communicate this stuff. The public develops a plan with dots and markers and notes and all those pieces as public comment. It gets rolled up. A year later, a plan gets unveiled for the new bicycle master plan, and it doesn't match anything the public did, and it compromises everything that the engineers know how to do. That is the public engagement process we're stuck in.
Edward: At Strong Towns, we have been promoting a different approach to that because that cycle breaks communication. It's not really engagement, it's just going through the actions. What we've found is that there's actually four steps to a public process that we need to really think about, so when we talk about these things through public engagement, we talk about humbly observing where somebody is struggling in your community. Any of us can walk around and we can observe in a humble way where somebody's struggling– crosswalk's missing, there's a housing issue, there's garbage on the street, broken road, pothole– you name it, we can identify that. Now, when we humbly observe, we can see where somebody is struggling in those pieces, and I train folks to [ask], “How do we put that in one sentence? What's the one thing we see?” The second component is not to hope that somebody can come in and fix that, not wait for Congress to act. It's to actually ask yourself, “What is the next smallest thing I could do to help ease that struggle?” This scales up and down. So if I'm a citizen and I see somebody hungry on the street corner, what's something I could do? I could go buy a sandwich for that person. If I'm in a leadership position, what could I do? I could be advocating for that soup kitchen or local grocery. There are different things that all of us have gifts and ability where we are, but what can we do in the next few weeks, next few hours or days to help ease that struggle? And then actually go do it. We can't just talk about it, we need to go do it.
Edward: What we've seen is by doing that and by repeating it, we can snowball incredible action in our communities. As it starts out, many of our Strong Towns members will have concerns about bussing or there isn’t any place to sit, so they’ll start by building benches. That’s a cheap thing to do, it’s a fun Saturday activity, and it’s kinda fun to be rogue and drop these benches in a location. When we learn how to do that and tackle that and ask ourselves what we can do, it now starts to scale up. We can start to tackle bigger things, more people start to join us in that effort that bring more gifts and ability to the table. So when I see the problem out there from a design standpoint, we’re not humble in our assumptions; we’re asserting ideas to move forward. When it comes to public engagement, we’re actually not communicating or in dialogue, it’s a guess-and-check or we pick the numbers and hope it moves forward. We ask the wrong people the wrong questions. Planners, the people that have a planning degree, are not designers, so asking them to figure out design struggles is like the wrong language for them; they don’t draw, they don’t understand how pieces go together, they understand good policy and how to administer that policy. That’s the stuff as an architect that I struggle with because it’s like, “let me just draw it, the plans,” and then get feedback and build out on it.
Edward: At Strong Towns, the advocacy work we do is at the most local level, so where do we see change? We can hope DC gets itself straight, we can moderately have some optimism that a state legislature might do something, but at the most local level, we’re seeing this action occur and happen at scale… it’s repeatable at scale. So yeah, I see that communication, kinda that false public engagement, getting the wrong people, asking them the wrong questions or asking them to do things that they are not comfortable or qualified to do… The thing that I see, that’s really the icing on the cake, is this– especially in local government, or in a municipal government– fear of failure. They’re so adverse to failure they would opt not to do anything, if that would prevent any opportunity to fail, and if we look at any innovative ideas that we’ve had– the iPhone, the internet, the things we do on our computers– they are built on the backs of many, many failures. But if we fail small, it’s a small setback, and we can learn from it and we can move forward on it, versus a big major project with no feedback loops… if we fail, it’s gonna fail really big.
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