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Public spaces are an essential part of any healthy city. But in recent years something very key has started disappearing from these spaces: comfortable places to sit. The "War on Sitting"1 refers to a tradition in public spaces where the provided seating options have shifted from subtly uncomfortable to outright aggressive. This type of design strategy is often referred to as "Hostile Architecture," a term which refers to the "design of buildings or public spaces in a way which discourages people from touching, climbing, or sitting on them, with the intention of avoiding damage or use for a different purpose."2 However, there is a difference between the theoretical and physical practices of Hostile Architecture. Through a series of observations, it seems that the focus is on keeping certain groups from existing comfortably within public spaces for a variety of reasons, with little concern for how these hostile interventions affect the space and its users as a whole.
The following studies look at two types of spaces: public parks and streetscapes. Parks are the traditional image of a public space within an urban context; they are open to the general public, most have no official hours, and they are places in which it is socially acceptable to spend hours. It is this type of freedom that hostile interventions threaten with the placement of sparse and uncomfortable seating options. Streetscapes are an integral part of the public realm but are often overlooked because they are rarely places in which people stop to linger. It can be difficult to grasp just how important these spaces are to the health of a city and the perception of both local and visiting users. The goal of these studies is to do the following:
* Identify what interventions might be especially hostile towards homeless populations.
* Visit the space at both active and inactive times to observe how the space is used.
* Hypothesize what prompted the integration of hostile elements or what types of behavior were deemed undesirable enough to prompt preventative installations. These reasons can vary dramatically depending on the site and its context.
* Conclude whether those interventions were successful in preventing undesirable behavior.
* Conclude what impact the hostile interventions have on all users.
Rittenhouse Square is...