13 Modern Marvels Invented Out of Pure Spite
In the 1920s, urban planner Robert Moses had an idea. He was building the Southern State Parkway on Long Island to take people to Jones Beach, and realized that incorporating low bridges limited what vehicles could go on it. Buses couldn’t fit under there, and given that the people traveling to the beach by bus were predominantly Black, a little bit of urban planning made Jones Beach a whiter place to be.
That is, obviously, absolutely disgusting, but as a principle of design, “let’s make this more difficult for the people we don’t like” has stuck around. It’s often known as “hostile architecture,” and is regularly deployed to make life more difficult for the people who have the least. If your town has a problem with homeless people sleeping on benches, the solution is to help those people find places to stay, not to make the benches cripplingly uncomfortable. That’s a psychotic way of solving a problem.
But all over the world, highly-paid people are patting themselves on the back for coming up with another way to make life harder for the most vulnerable, often in ways that the luckier among us don’t notice. Well done, you assholes, have some more cocaine. And if you’ve also made life more difficult for elderly people, disabled people and, you know, the population in general, well, fuck ‘em!
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Shitty Un-Sit-on-Able Benches
One of the most common pieces of hostile architecture is the shitty fucking 45-degree benches in bus shelters. They’re so effective at preventing people from sleeping on them that you also can’t goddamn sit on the things.
Vancouver’s Kooky Art Designed to Stab
There’s an art installation in Vancouver covering air vents — the kind of warmth-emitting place a freezing person might be drawn in the cold Canadian night — that, as well as looking interesting and arty, would massively injure anyone lying on it.
Decorative Spikes for That ‘Urban Dungeon’ Feel
Even Boris Johnson — objectively a bastard — was horrified when the owners of luxury London apartments surrounded them with “anti-homeless spikes,” designed to ensure nobody has the gall to be poor within a millionaire’s eyeline.
Spiting Skaters by Spiking Asses
Skateboarding — an Olympic sport btw — so horrifies some urban planners that they’ll happily put unpleasant, sharp edges on otherwise pleasant walls. Known as “pigs’ ears,” they make life more difficult for literally everyone around them. Still, fuck skateboarders, eh?
Portland’s Tent-Destroying Boulders
The Oregon Department of Transportation uses the phrase “aggressive landscaping” to describe the boulders it placed to move along illegal campers. The ODOT insists that spending millions on making homeless people’s lives harder is “a safety issue.” Get fucked!
London’s Anti-Fun Benches
Camden Borough Council in London had a new type of bench designed, specifically intended to be uncomfortable so people would sit on them for as short a time as possible. Yeah, well done, you absolute pricks.
Seattle’s Under-Bridge Cyclists’ Haven
In Seattle in 2018, a spot under a bridge popular with homeless people was filled with bike racks, making camping there impossible. It was at no point about giving cyclists somewhere to park their bikes, and nobody pretended it was.
San Francisco’s Pridewashed Rock
In 2019, a restaurant in the Castro District placed a boulder in an entryway to stop homeless people from sheltering there. They then painted it in rainbow colors to make the nicest-looking, most inclusive mean-spirited thing that they could.
Q: What Do Intravenous Drug Users Need? A: Darkness and Difficulty!
Blue lights are common in public bathrooms, designed to make it more difficult for intravenous drug users to see veins — i.e., fuck off and do your drugs elsewhere. The result? People injecting just as many drugs, but clumsily. Great!
New Zealand: Always Cleaning That Hard-to-Reach Spot
In 2018, multiple businesses in Auckland’s central business district installed sprinklers in their doorways to go off during the night — you know, for totally non-assholey reasons. The solution to homelessness is clearly rendering homeless people wet and sick. You pricks.
The Anti-Teenager Weapon
The Mosquito device emits an ultra-high frequency sound, generally only audible — and unpleasantly so — to the under-25s, to stop teenagers gathering and getting up to no good. Or good. Or anything. Kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.
The Solution to Antisocial Behavior: Making Teens Feel Ugly
Several cities in the U.K. have installed pink lights at places where teenagers hang out — deliberately unflattering lighting that makes acne more visible and draws attention to blemishes. Great! What troublemaking teens need is lower self-esteem!
Those Armrests Aren’t Armrests
Municipal benches don’t have armrests as somewhere for you to relieve the exhaustion in your hard-working upper limbs — they’re there to make it impossible for tired homeless people to lie down. Such a simple, elegant, innovative bit of bastardry.
