Cities Have Started Designing People Out of Them

There is a particular kind of German square that appears, at first, to be harmless. It is clean, paved, open, efficient. A tram stop at one edge. A bakery with outdoor tables at another. A few young trees, still too thin to cast serious shade. Some stone blocks that might be decorative, or might be seating, though they are too cold in winter, too hot in summer, and too awkward in every season to invite anyone to stay for long.

Nobody has technically been excluded. There is no sign saying do not sit. No barricade stopping you. Nothing dramatic enough to photograph and circulate as proof of cruelty. The square simply offers no reason to remain.

This is the genius of contemporary hostile urban design. It rarely announces itself as hostility. It arrives as maintenance or budget discipline, as a necessary safety feature or as modernisation. Usually its all about efficiency. Efficiency that creates bus stops where waiting is possible but resting is not or removes trash cans because emptying them more money then just cleaning the street.

The result is not always spectacularly cruel. Often, it is worse: administratively cruel. Cities aren't built with bad hostile design in mind. But there is a process behind all of this indirectly forcing the hand of otherwise talented designers to make it work, make it cheap, and efficient. And if thats not enough already design them in a way to keep the homeless from gathering.

Germany has not been spared this logic. In fact, its cities may be especially vulnerable to it because so much harm can be hidden inside the process of order. A plaza without seating looks “tidy”, a park without dense bushes looks “visible and neat, a pedestrian zone without public amenities looks “streamlined and efficient”. Yet beneath these words lies a question cities increasingly avoid: safe for whom, visible to whom, clean for whom?

Public space is often described as democratic because, in theory, everybody can enter it. But entry is a low standard. A humane public space does not merely allow bodies to pass through. It allows them to pause, wait, recover, or even serve as a meeting point, a place to cool down, eat, read, speak or be alone. By that measure, many modern cityscapes are becoming less public than they appear.

The issue is not only the infamous architecture of spikes and anti-sleep benches, though those remain the clearest symbols. Hostile architecture is generally understood as design that uses the built environment to guide, restrict, or prevent behaviour, especially behaviour associated with people who rely on public space more than others: unhoused people, teenagers, elderly people, disabled people, poor people, and anyone who cannot or doesn't wan't to retreat into a private room, office, car, or café.  

But the subtler version is more common. Instead of making it impossible to sleep on a bench, a city simply installs too few benches. Instead of policing loitering, it creates places where lingering feels unnatural and uncomfortable. Instead of admitting that homelessness is being displaced, it uses design to make homelessness less visible to shoppers, commuters, and tourists.

This is the central dishonesty of defensive urbanism. It does not solve the social problems it claims to manage. It relocates them. It turns poverty into a spatial inconvenience and then congratulates itself for having cleaned the street.

In Germany, the moral stakes are not abstract. According to Destatis, around 474,700 people were recorded as housed in accommodation because of homelessness at the end of January 2025, an increase from 439,500 in 2024. The official figure does not include people sleeping rough or those hidden in informal arrangements, such as staying temporarily with friends or relatives.   In other words, the people most affected by defensive public-space design are also the people least fully captured by the clean statistical surface of the state.

And yet the built environment speaks to them constantly.

It says: You may sit, but not lie down.
You may wait, but not stay.
You may pass through, but not belong.
You may be visible only as long as you are moving.

The city, in this mode, becomes less like a shared civic room and more like an airport terminal without departures: polished, surveilled, uncomfortable by design, and suspicious of anyone who remains too long.

What makes this especially perverse is that the features removed in the name of controlling homelessness are the same features that make cities liveable for everyone. Because benches are not a luxury, shade is not decoration, trash cans are not aesthetic clutter and greenery is not a lifestyle accessory for renderings and real-estate brochures. These are basic elements of urban care.

A bench is useful to the elderly person whose knees hurt, to the parent holding a tired child, to the delivery worker between shifts, to the teenager with nowhere expensive to go, to the tourist reading a map, to the person having a panic attack, to the office worker eating a sandwich, to the unhoused person who has been walking for hours. Its usefulness is exactly why hostile design targets it. The bench is dangerous to a control-minded city because it permits the simplest form of freedom: stopping.

Shade functions in a similar way. It is both climate infrastructure and social permission. A shaded square invites time. It makes a place bearable. It slows the city down. But shade requires trees, and trees require soil, maintenance, planning, patience, and the acceptance of mess: leaves, roots, birds, unevenness, seasonal change. A tree is not as administratively convenient as paving.

Still, the case for urban greenery is no longer just sentimental. Research on Munich public squares, published in 2026, emphasises that trees are crucial for mitigating urban heat, while also showing how their cooling capacity is challenged by climate change and extensive soil sealing. The point is almost embarrassingly simple: when cities replace living surfaces with sealed ones, they manufacture heat. When they fail to plant and protect trees, they remove one of the few forms of public cooling available to people without private escape.

And the absurdity goes further. The shade that is denied to people is also denied to the city itself. Trees do not merely make streets more pleasant; they protect the surfaces beneath them. Without shade, pavements, asphalt, and façades absorb more heat, hold it longer, and release it back into the air after the sun has gone. The city becomes an oven of its own making. In extreme heat, roads soften, paving expands, and infrastructure generally ages faster. What is presented as low-maintenance design becomes, in the long run, a different kind of maintenance problem: more heat, more damage, more repairs, more public money spent undoing the consequences of a hostile landscape.

This is what makes the logic so self-defeating. The city is not only designed against the vulnerable body resting in public space. It is designed against itself. In trying to eliminate mess, shade, softness, and care, it produces a harsher environment for everyone and a more fragile environment for everything. A treeless square is not just uncomfortable. It is bad urban engineering disguised as order.

Trash cans tell another story. Their disappearance is usually defended through the dull language of cost and operations. Fewer bins mean fewer collections. Fewer collections mean lower costs. Lower costs mean efficiency. But the equation is false because the need does not disappear. Waste does not evaporate because a city removes the container. It migrates: into gutters, parks, doorways, and eventually into the public mood. Then the city points to the mess as evidence that the public cannot be trusted.

This is how austerity disguises itself as moral judgment. First, remove the infrastructure that allows people to behave well. Then condemn them for failing to behave well without it.

There is a strange visual culture to this. Many modern urban spaces now look like architectural renderings that accidentally became real: flat, pale, smooth, under-furnished, over-lit. They are designed to photograph well from a distance and fail at the scale of the human body. While the render shows happy silhouettes. The finished place gives them nowhere to sit.

The deeper issue is that urban design has absorbed a suspicion of ordinary public life. People gathering without a purchase are treated as a risk. Teenagers become “loitering.” Poor people become “disorder.” Unhoused people become “a safety concern.” Informal social life becomes something to be managed, moved along, or designed out.

This suspicion is often framed as compassion for other users of the city. A shop owner does not want a doorway blocked. A commuter wants the station to feel safe. A parent wants the playground clean. These concerns are not invented. Public space does involve conflict. A city is not made humane by pretending that every use is compatible with every other use at every moment.

But hostile design is not conflict resolution. It is conflict avoidance through exclusion.

A better city would ask harder questions. Why are people sleeping in stations? Why does the bench have to serve as emergency furniture? Why are there not enough shelters, bathrooms, cooling spaces or social workers? Why is the design budget being used to make suffering less visible instead of making public space more generous?

The cruelty of hostile architecture is not only that it targets the vulnerable. It is that it allows everyone else to look away. If there is nowhere to sleep, nobody has to see sleeping. If there is nowhere to sit, nobody has to decide who deserves rest. If the square is empty, the emptiness can be mistaken for success.

Design always has an ethics, whether it admits it or not. The angle of a bench, the height of a ledge or the location of a bin. Each small choice suggests an answer to the question of who the city is for. Not in manifesto language. In daily use.

A humane city does not have to be naïve. It can accept that public space, because it is public, will never be as controlled as a shopping mall.

That last point may be the real discomfort. The modern city increasingly wants the emotional atmosphere of public life with the behavioural control of private property. It wants street culture without unpredictability, plazas without politics, benches without sleepers, parks without maintenance, squares without mess, publicness without the public.

But cities are not product pages and cannot be reduced to frictionless user flows. The human body is not an inconvenience in the interface of urban life. It gets tired, it sweats and it ages. A city that cannot tolerate these needs is not well-designed. It is merely well-defended.

Germany, with its strong planning traditions and civic infrastructure, should be capable of something better than defensive minimalism. Its cities do not need to become sentimental. They need to become honest. If a bench is divided so nobody can lie on it, say so. If a square has no shade because maintenance was deemed too expensive, say so. If public space is being shaped to protect commercial comfort over human dignity, say so.

Then let residents decide whether that is the kind of city they want.

Because the opposite of hostile architecture is not disorder. It is hospitality. Not the soft, commercial hospitality of hotels and restaurants, where welcome depends on payment, but civic hospitality: the idea that a city should make room for the basic facts of being alive.

A hospitable city gives people places to sit without demanding they buy coffee. It plants trees whose shade is shared by strangers. It keeps trash cans visible because it expects public life to happen. It designs bathrooms, fountains, shelters, and parks as infrastructure, not indulgence. It understands that maintenance is not a burden added to urban life; maintenance is urban life.

The measure of a city is not how efficiently it moves people through space. It is whether people can remain there with dignity.

And right now, too many places are failing that test. With an empty square in the sun, a missing bench, a vanished bin, and a tree that was never planted.