Poster #110 - Segmentations and Spikes: How Local Governments Use Hostile Architecture to Navigate Preemption

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

State preemption, or the restriction of local powers due to overriding state law, is an increasingly prominent feature of urban policymaking. One policy area where preemption is especially noticeable is municipal responses to homelessness. For example, in Florida (a state with broad preemption), counties and municipalities are barred from "authorizing or otherwise allowing public camping or sleeping on public property." While literature across disciplines (policy, urban affairs, and law) has focused on the role of the public sector in responding to homelessness via sheltering/access to housing, policing, and health assistance, little to no work has developed a comprehensive investigation of local responses to preemption via changes to the built environment, such as "hostile architecture." Therefore, how does preemption of homelessness response shape the adoption of hostile architecture as a form of local governance and urban design? In this paper, I conceptualize hostile architecture (e.g. segmented benches) as a design-based exclusionary response that allows localities to adhere to preemption while exercising informal control over homeless populations. Thus, when localities are constrained in what they are able to do to address homelessness in an assistive manner, they may substitute toward punitive and more informal design-based responses to the built environment. To assess the national landscape of these responses, I use publicly available state statutes to construct a typology that categorizes all 50 states by their scope of anti-homeless preemption. Additionally, to better grasp the on-the-ground dynamics of design- and exclusion-based homelessness responses across areas, I utilize three illustrative city case studies that tease out design-based approaches to homelessness response under three distinct preemption regimes. By using ordinances and procurement records, I trace the policy process and characterize the adoption of hostile architecture as a component of local homelessness response. In total, this work allows academics and practitioners alike to become familiar with the policy substitutions that result from intergovernmental constraints on an important urban policy issue. Further, it will center hostile architecture in the discussion of local policymaking on homelessness and sets up further research on the spatial distribution of punitive designs across urban areas, as driven by both preemption and ideology.

Author

• Rory Renzy, University of North Florida
  Presenting Author