On "the spectacle of life played out in public"
Issue 180: We need to talk about hostile architecture and eating outside.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter.
Read yesterday’s dispatch: I need this mac and cheese dispenser in my house, pronto
Amid the chatter as of late about the logistics and safety of outdoor dining during Covid-19, The New Republic staff writer Matt Ford made a wry observation:
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It’s called hostile architecture, and it’s just as pervasive as it is easily ignored by those with the privilege to ignore it. Have you ever seen a bench that’s divided in half? A retaining wall with “decorative” spikes on top? Boulders or bollards conveniently placed in building alcoves?
These are specifically to prevent housing-insecure folks from resting, to prevent people from lingering too long, to prevent “undesirable” behaviors like skateboarding. Hostile architecture restricts public spaces to only those deemed the “right kinds” of people doing the “right kinds” of activities. (Typically, white people engaging in capitalism-rooted activities like purchasing/consuming food, shopping, or taking leisurely breaks.)
Laws regulating conduct in public spaces are often only enforced as a pretext for racist policing. The criminalization of loitering and open alcohol containers, for example, can also fall into the category of hostile architecture in this way. In an op-ed at Streets Blog NYC, Shabazz Stuart notes that, as restaurants reopen for outdoor dining, people are being served alcohol on the sidewalks — technically illegal, but kinda sorta deemed passable during the pandemic though no policies have changed.
He calls for the city to issue a moratorium on these laws in the short term, and to have serious discussions about their necessity at all in the long term. He writes:
I really enjoy the New Orleanification of the five boroughs, but I’ll never quite be comfortable with the legal gray zone that has produced it. There was never any announcement or official acknowledgement — one day everyone just decided it was OK.
I dread the day a police officer decides that it’s not OK for me.
I dread the notion of continually looking over my shoulder, wondering if the next cop meandering nearby will capriciously re-discover the illegality of outdoor drinking.
Firm, binding, antiracist policy changes are absolutely necessary for returning public spaces to the public. Officializing such progress (rather than relegating it to temporary, informal declarations) puts the decision-making power in the hands of government, which is ostensibly beholden to all people without discrimination, rather than individual police officers or chiefs. (That said, it is deeply obvious that government policies, at all levels, are not always conceived, enacted, and enforced in nondiscriminatory ways. It’s often the opposite, which is how we’ve ended up in this very situation. So this is why it’s vital to support politicians committed to antiracism in the public sphere — and to exercise our constitutionally protected right to use those public spaces for protests when elected officials fall short.)
Some examples of hostile architecture:
(photos by George Etheredge for The New York Times)
As we talked about here last week with the urban garden inside Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, we need to rethink the way we structure common spaces — for food production, yes, but also just for general existence.
In a recent column on eating at newly reopened restaurants, New York Times critic Pete Wells wrote:
The outdoor dining program happens to dovetail with the department’s wider effort to turn some of the city’s streets over to walkers, runners and skateboarders. That list now includes eaters and drinkers, which anybody who enjoys the spectacle of life played out in public will recognize as a promising move.
I, for one, greatly enjoy the spectacle of life played out in public, which is such a lovely description. It’s why I’m so interested in projects like Open Streets, which advocate and offer resources for cities to limit car traffic to make room for people.
However. In a powerful essay at Bloomberg’s City Lab, Black transit planner Destiny Thomas writes that, if open streets are filled with police and white vigilantes; if open streets are created without full participation of marginalized communities; if open streets are executed as “quick-build” projects without meaningfully addressing the legacies of racism and racial environmental/climate injustice — then not only are open streets ineffective, they too become hostile urban features.
She writes:
Every week in America, people like Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd have their lives stolen because their visibility in public space goes against the ways we’ve come to understand who should have access to “outside” and how they should be allowed to access it. Without a plan to include and protect Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people, or a plan to address anti-Black vigilantism and police brutality, these open streets are set up to fail.
If the desire of white middle/upper class folks to eat out during a pandemic is truly the spark for reorienting our streets and sidewalks, it’s illuminating and angering to think of what wasn’t enough. Decades of institutionalized contempt for homeless people wasn’t enough. Tear gassing and ramming police cars into peaceful protesters wasn’t enough. The harassment and murder of Black people in the streets wasn’t enough.
So, will the pandemic be enough to force the creation of more inclusive spaces for eating, drinking, and spending time in public? And if so, is it only because hostile architecture is finally affecting white people?
