‘Anti-Homeless’ benches in Tokyo
Images from Yumiko Hayakawa
Yumiko Hayakawa has a very thoughtful and well-illustrated article at OhMyNews on the story behind the variety of ‘anti-homeless’ benches and architectural features (including public art) in Tokyo’s parks and public areas – by making it difficult or impossible to lie down. (We’ve looked briefly before at benches with central armrests before, along with anti-sit devices and of course anti-skateboarding measures – ‘disciplinary architecture‘)
Many of the features, such as the benches shown above and below, are also designed to discourage everyone from spending too long on them, even when sitting normally, by deliberately making them uncomfortable:
“The bench in the photo below may appear to be of modern design, but because of its tubular construction one risks sliding off if not careful.
One should be especially careful if drunk at the time! Made of stainless steel, the benches are hot in summer and cold in winter. The Toshima-ward parks office, which oversees Ikebukuro West Park, home to this bench, describes the bench as “designed to keep with the modern image of the area while at the same time not allowing homeless people to loiter.”
Suggestions that the benches were dangerously slippery and also uncomfortable met with the advice that “people should take the utmost care when sitting on them” and that these benches were only something to lean on or sit on for a few minutes.
That is, they want us to regard the bench as “somewhere you can sit if you have to.” It makes you wonder who would actually want to sit on such a bench.”
There are examples of bus stop ‘perches’ and uncomfortable café seating to discourage loitering from many areas of the world, but it does seem as though Tokyo’s authorities perhaps see inconveniencing all members of the public as merely collateral damage in a ‘war’ against the homeless, which itself is more than simply contentious. Nevertheless, people adapt and find their own ways around discipline. Hayakawa interviewed some homeless people about the benches:
“Most common were the “defeatists,” who gave up on the grounds that the benches were so uncomfortable that it was easier to just lay down a newspaper and sit on the ground. Next most common were the “optimists,” who argued that while they found it a hassle to be unable to sit on benches for a long period of time, it did mean that other park users had to put up with seeing homeless people less. Finally, there were the
“innovators,” who would lie folding their bodies into a V-shape around the central bench divider, or placing bags on either sides of the divider at the same height, or even placing a camping stove underneath the stainless steel tubular bench above to cook and at the same time warm the bench!”
“Do artefacts have politics?” Langdon Winner asked in 1986; the answer is, of course, yes.
The will to loiter exceeds design cleverness.
sorry, forgot link
http://www.niblettes.com/chinese_lounge.jpg
That’s a great photo, thanks John!
[...] Das Funktionsprinzip, das Architektur und Design ermöglicht, Macht auf uns auszuüben, ist das der passiven Kontrolle: Wir sind eingeschränkt in unserer Bewegungsfreiheit, können und sollen uns nur dort aufhalten, wo es uns gnädigst gestattet wird. Der Panoptismus der modernen Kontrollgesellschaft unterstützt diesen Prozess. Jetzt kann man Foucault lesen oder das Blog von Dan Lockton. Dort findet man Artikel zum Thema, z.B. über Bänke, die verhindern sollen, dass sich ein Obdachloser auf ihnen schlafen legt. File under: Die Welt mit anderen Augen sehen. [...]
Believe me or not, but I’ve been willing to send you a picture of these for a while now – it’s just that I always forget to photograph them when I pass there. Oh well…
Btw, equally intriguing (and a tad disturbing) are the numerous anti-suicide measures you find in buildings here. E.g. nets, double doors, etc.
Ever seen those slicers for cheese? A single wire on a handle connected to a board?
I’m looking at the ‘suicide net’ and thought ‘Cheese Slicer’.
It’d work better if there were fewer strands.
Last time I had to take the plane at Heathrow airport I came across such an invention. My plane left London really early and I decided to spend the night at the airport. What they did there for you not to sleep on the 4 seater benches in the airport is just taking out the third seat. Nobody can lie down on those benches now.
[...] More anti-sit devices and anti-homeless benches. Please share this!These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
[...] Seems like the owners of the Caltrans District 7 building cares a lot about its occupants – littering the plaza with sculptures and benches – but their real purpose is to deter any large vehicles that may be carrying explosives into the building. Apart from terrorists, building and urban space planners are also increasingly targeting other “threats” like skateboarders and the homeless. [...]
[...] Japan may have some of the most explicitly user-unfriendly public benches we’ve come across so far, but there’s also something rather disturbing about the sheer blandness of the bench implementations shown above. Their starkness embodies the thinking behind the design: all possible interaction methods to be reduced down to one sole, pre-defined utility function, with the user not permitted to do anything outside that intentionally myopic definition. [...]
[...] Creating worry in the customers’ minds would certainly seem to be effective – perhaps more effective than simply deliberately uncomfortable seating, which we’ve come across a number of times before. But is it really a sensible tactic? Won’t those customers, if they use the airport again, consciously avoid “that café where we nearly missed out flight last time because they turned the monitors off”? Has it occurred to the café operators that, perhaps, their customers value sitting down to ‘nurse’ their coffees as part of the coffee-drinking experience? [...]
This. Is. Insane. Design is supposed to help people …
[...] interesting colossal time-sink. I bookmarked the site years ago because of an article about park benches designed primarily to keep vagrants from sleeping on them. This is even creepier. Design with Intent | Deliberately creating worry One of the cafés in an [...]
I understand the desire to discourage people from sleeping a park bench, but from the pictures this seems to be at the expense of comfort for the people who would actually use it. It looks like you would slide off the first – and it will only seat two strangers – and the second looks both uncomfortable and fought with danger. Sit too far back or forward and you will end up on the floor in a heap.
I prefer the stainless steel one, as the earlier bench (both in its design and construction) suggests that a greater impetus has been put on deterring people in general, from sitting on it.
[...] es el primer caso ni en esta ciudad ni en ninguna otra, empezaron con los bancos con una barra en medio para evitar que la gente se pudiera tumbar, pero poco a poco esta arquitectura se ha ido [...]