Although "hostile architecture" is a recent term, nineteenth-century criticisms, such as Pugin's Contrasts (1836), highlighted inaccessible public amenities as a critique of modern society. More recently, critics of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) have noted how defensive strategies perpetuate inequality under the guise of safety. Meanwhile, as activism has drawn attention to these practices, strategies have shifted from explicit deterrents (spikes and chains) to more subtle elements like bike racks, boulders, and planters. I argue that CPTED and "defensible space" theories facilitated a "double erasure": the physical removal of unhoused individuals and the masking of the design’s own hostile intent. By reframing "hostility" as a neutral by-product of safety, contemporary urban governance justifies exclusion to a "housed public" who may otherwise be uncomfortable with explicit violence. Focusing on the city of Eugene, Oregon—which has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the United States—I propose a Typology of Disguise to study these gradual shifts toward implicit measures in urban policies and design theories.
Visual Strategy
The poster presents this historical and theoretical framework through two main visual elements:
- Historical Timeline: A graphic timeline tracing the transition from Pugin’s nineteenth-century moral critiques to the formalization of CPTED in the 1970s. This timeline introduces key policies, events, and theories accompanied by related visuals.
- Graphic Presentation of Typologies: A comprehensive visual index categorizing the "mechanisms of disguise" identified in the research. These typologies are mapped through specific case studies from Eugene, Oregon, visualizing the shift from explicit deterrents to "ghost amenities" (missing infrastructure), "fake functions" (e.g., segmented benches), and "socially desirable forms" (e.g., planters and bike lanes used as barriers).