Abstract

Public spaces are an important feature of the urban landscape as they promote the well-being of its residents through facilitating social interactions and providing a place for relaxation. Economically, urban centers with well-developed public spaces also attract more investments as they connote the idea of well-balanced societies. Therefore, governments and urban authorities emphasize on the development of well-designed urban spaces that ensure socio-economic benefits can be obtained. Despite this, findings show that many public spaces are misused through vandalism, rough sleeping by the homeless and anti-social behaviour such as drug-taking. In order to tackle such challenges and ensure the public spaces are well used, diverse strategies are suggested which range from small-scale interventions such as CCTV to large scale policies and use of barriers or hostile architecture. The key focus of this research was to identify arguments supporting the adoption of hostile architecture as a strategy to facilitate effective use of public spaces. The significance of the topic was to inform urban developers and authorities on the effectiveness of hostile architecture thereby, promoting its continued use. To address the research objectives, data was collected by examining case studies of hostile architecture in three cities; Glasgow, New York and New Delhi. The reviewed case studies were observed in the last decade (2011 to 2021) in order to understand how the use of hostile architecture encouraged effective use of public spaces. Findings reported showed that where the hostile architecture was used in the appropriate context, it was effective in keeping out unwanted behaviour from the public spaces. However, criticisms against its use were still observed as the architecture was argued to transform cities into ugly and uninviting places.