Above photo: Left: Father Julio Lancellotti destroying stones under an overpass. Photo via Twitter. Right: An overhead shot of São Paulo, Brazil. Warlley Guedes / Unsplash.
Easier Said Than Done.
Advocates say truly combatting hostile architecture requires urban planning to prioritize social welfare over exclusion and financialization.
In February 2021, at the height of the pandemic, images of a lone priest standing beneath an overpass with a sledgehammer in his hands captured Brazil’s attention.
Father Julio Lancellotti, a São Paulo-based priest known for his work with trans people and those living on the streets, had crushed hundreds of stones placed there by São Paulo’s mayor to prevent homeless people from taking shelter beneath the overpass.
Lancellotti was protesting hostile architecture, the design of public spaces or structures to discourage their use. From removing seating from train stations to installing metal dividers on benches, hostile architecture attempts to keep the “unwanted” away from certain spaces — especially keeping unhoused people from seeking shelter, sleeping, sitting or existing in the public.
“It’s a concept: the city isn’t hospitable. And the poor are not welcome,” Father Julio said an interview for ArchDaily. “An architectural project based on a neoliberal epistemology can only be like this. It has several impediments, not everyone can enter, the entrance is selective…Have you ever seen a homeless person in a shopping center? They don’t even get past the door. They’re not public or democratic spaces. We have fenced squares.”
For decades, Father Lancellotti has called attention to the increasing social exclusion in São Paulo. But the iconic images of the priest wielding his sledgehammer finally pushed Brazil’s National Congress to take up his issue.
In November of 2023, congressional lawmakers passed the Father Julio Lancellotti Act to make hostile architecture illegal. Yet just over a year later, the law still hasn’t been put into practice.
While Father Lancellotti’s symbolic act ignited a national conversation, the future of hostile architecture hinges both on lawmakers’ effective regulation – as well as their willingness to recognize all residents’ right to the city. When so-called “defensive design” is built into the mindset of urban planning, experts and advocates say, a single law can only do so much.
A Deeper Social Issue
After lawmakers passed the Father Julio Lancellotti Act, then-President Jair Bolsonaro vetoed the legislation. Congress quickly revoked his veto with a Senate vote; only four senators voted against the bill, which technically went into effect in January 2023.
Despite its overwhelming approval, the law had to wait almost a year for regulation, until Bolsonaro’s successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, signed the decree at a December 2023 ceremony attended by human rights and street activists.
The decree stipulates measures to curb the use of hostile materials, structures, equipment and construction techniques in open spaces for public use. It also requires urban planning tools and policies, such as zoning regulations and building codes, to help prevent the use of hostile architectural elements. The federal government is also obliged to guide municipalities, in cooperation with states, to comply with the decree, especially in adapting master plans, building codes and local legislation.
After the decree regulating the law on hostile architecture, the government integrated some diluted measures into the National Plan for Visible Streets. Since early 2013, the plan has sought to assist the homeless population through social assistance, health, education, housing and job creation.
However, experts say the law’s effective application still depends on how states and municipalities adapt their local legislation. Challenges related to real estate lobbyists remain, which can make it difficult to implement more inclusive rules.
Father Lancellotti, who says he receives daily complaints on his social networks, has proposed the creation of a complaints channel accessible to anyone. Meanwhile, far-right politicians in São Paulo are calling for Lancellotti to be investigated for creating “a mafia of misery” in the city through his work supporting drug addicts and unhoused communities.
The priest’s opponents have collected signatures for a parliamentary inquiry to investigate NGOs that operate in the city’s central region. They are particularly targeting what is known as “Cracolandia,” a downtown area overrun by crack users, where Father Lancellotti offers spiritual support, food, shelter and connections to healthcare and rehabilitation services.
The opposition makes clear that banning hostile architecture will not solve all the urban problems that these exclusionary design choices represent.
To social anthropologist Alana Moraes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, hostile architecture “is part of this whole machine operated by those who consider themselves the owners of urban spaces.”
“They are a very important but sometimes silent face of the racialized hygienist violence that is often applauded by the city’s middle and upper classes,” she argues.
Across time and space, urban planners and city officials have turned to hostile architecture as a band-aid solution to address homelessness and crime. In 19th-century England and America, urine deflectors were used to prevent people from urinating in certain places. reaching particular areas of cities. Across the U.S., redlining, “urban renewal” policies, exclusionary zoning, food apartheid, inaccessible public transportation and other urban planning choices have enforced and reified racial and class segregation.
Architects Elenara Stein Leitão, Oscar Muller and Vinicius Gonçalves tell Next City that hostile architecture is just one facet of “a society that focuses on security, often the fruit of social exclusion, in which it would be possible to differentiate into two strands: the security of those who own property and the expulsion of the undesirables.”
A simple example shows how pervasive this approach of social exclusion is. “The colour chosen by fast food restaurants is intended not to welcome, but to make people leave more quickly once they finish their meals,” they explain.
Design choices that aim to push those deemed undesirable from the public view do not only hurt homeless communities. They also harm elderly, disabled and pregnant individuals, as well as the general public, who can find it difficult to find a decent place to sit, rest or use the bathroom when they leave their homes.
The use of hostile architecture in Brazil dates back to the mid-1980s, explains architect and researcher Gustavo de Lucca. Its use is linked to the rise of large, closed condominiums, shopping centers and other spaces that segregate urban living. In recent years, the situation has worsened, accompanying the growth of poverty and social exclusion while the luxury market has grown, de Lucca says
Hostile architecture grew as a response by elites to the growth of poverty and social exclusion, not only in large urban centers such as São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro but also in medium-sized cities such as Recife, Campinas or João Pessoa.
“Hostile architecture remains an individual solution to collective problems and therefore, besides not solving anything, it contributes to amplifying already existing tensions,” de Lucca says.
Even if the most obvious examples of hostile architecture are eradicated under Brazil’s new law, segregated spaces where different social classes have little contact will continue to exist. Brazile’s newly-built flats still come with so-called maid’s rooms and servants’ quarters, reserved for the individuals who clean, cook and take care of their bosses’ homes.
Experts say the problem is the mentality behind urban planning. To change that requires a total transformation of how cities are understood: not as a real estate commodity, but a public common.
“The city is not a financial asset. It cannot be hostage to the dynamics of speculation … [which] decides who can or who cannot remain in the spaces, whether to sleep or to do anything else,” argues Moraes, the social anthropologist. “They decide who are the ‘undesirables’, the ‘disposable’ and who are the ones who can have the right to live the city, to enjoy its spaces and collective goods.”
She points to São Paulo’s MTST, or Homeless Workers’ Movement, a social movement advocating for housing rights. Founded in 1997, the group mobilizes landless and homeless individuals, aiming to address urban housing inequalities and occupy empty buildings.
In these occupations, she says, organizers begin by building a collective kitchen. This space opens up these vacant spaces to the neighborhood, enabling people to meet and begin creating networks of care.
“If there is something that is opposed to hostile architecture, it is this open architecture made by housing movements,” she argues. “Everyone has a commitment to that space, unlike the agents of speculation that are focused on the production of value, on the private appropriation of an asset that belongs to everyone.”