It would be hard to find a more blatant and unapologetic attempt to deter loiterers than the Camden Bench — a seemingly innocuous piece of brutalist urban architecture, hidden in plain sight on the streets of London.

Installed by Camden's local council in 2012, according to UK-based artist Stuart Semple, the benches are the best example of the worst kind of urban design.

"It's basically a big ugly concrete bench … It's kind of like its designers are proud of the fact that it's anti-everything," he says.

As critic Frank Swain put it, the Camden Bench is the "perfect anti-object" — a largely featureless lump of concrete that is just curved enough, just angled enough and sufficiently solid to deter extended interaction of any kind.

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"The Camden Bench is a concerted effort to create a non-object … a strange kind of architectural null point," Mr Swain says.

Despite its imposing concrete brutality, the Camden Bench is in fact one of the more subtle instances of what's known as "hostile architecture" — a kind of urban design intended to control, coerce and often prohibit interaction and social relations in public space.

A cluster of the uncomfortable benches outside Freemasons' Hall in Camden. ( Wikicommons: Eluveitie/CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Hostile architecture takes many forms, from the overt and aggressive, like metal bars on park benches and anti-homeless spikes, to the seemingly innocuous, such as benches mounted just a little too high, to make lingering uncomfortable.

But if, as urban sociologist Robert Park wrote, in making the city we make ourselves, one might wonder what collective self-conception has produced a city covered in metal spikes, illuminated by blue lights, buzzing with high-frequencies — paranoid, anxious and hostile, by design.

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With his artwork, Semple aims to break down the barriers that impede social life. His latest campaign, calling on people to photograph and share examples of what he calls "design crimes", is an attempt to document the impact this kind of design has on our urban landscape.

"Very slowly, bus stops get perches so you can't really sit on them, spikes appear [and] there's a lot more sound being used now," Semple says.

"Some councils are actually playing frequencies that are targeted at young people's ears and it stops teenagers congregating.

"When we talk about hostile design, hostile architecture, make no mistake — there are groups of people spending time, effort and money commissioning this stuff and designing it to be as brutal as possible against human beings."

"We know this from architecture history — if you start making things look ugly, uninviting, hostile and dangerous, those places start to become like that."

Who has a right to the city?

The use of disciplinary architecture in public space is nothing new.

It has long been used to control, manipulate and police the ways in which public space is used and the forms of interaction and sociality that are possible within it.

Its use, however, as an instrument for urban segregation — to separate those entitled to access public space from those deemed undesirable — is a growing phenomenon.

"It's a symptom of a deeper malaise in the way cities are used," urban designer Malcolm Mackay says.

"Historically, defensive architecture was used to deal with the enemy without — the marauding hordes coming over the horizon, knocking at the city gates and trying to get in."

Today, he says, that anxiety has been turned inwards.

This shift has accompanied a radical redefinition of public space, one that has seen common ownership transferred to ownership by strata companies or large corporations.

A metal spikes outside a private block of residential flats in London. ( Getty Images: Dan Kitwood )

"What we think of as public spaces that make up our modern cities are actually private spaces or semi-private spaces," Mr Mackay says.

"The public are allowed in, if you're the right sort of person."

When Victoria's Chief Commissioner, Graham Ashton, vowed to remove the "unsightly" and "disgusting" homeless encampments in Melbourne's CBD last year, the line between those deemed to belong to the commons and those viewed as other, was put into stark relief.

Splintered urbanism

The increasing prevalence of hostile design has coincided with a shift in the nature, definition and experience of homelessness in our cities, according to Tom Baker, lecturer in human geography at the University of Auckland.

"What we've seen over many decades, but particularly the '70s and '80s onwards, is a splintering of cities," he says.

"Different castes of people that might occupy the same place live in largely different universes, so that the wealthy and the middle-class scurry between different parts of the city largely sealed off from those that are less well off.

"And I think that the homeless are the pointy end of that."

Baker points out that according to the definition provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, homelessness does not simply imply the absence of a house, but crucially, the absence of social relations that are promoted within that house.

The definition of homelessness along with our sense of mutual obligation has, historically, been fluid.

Benches like this, at Miami Beach in the United States, stop the homeless from lying down. ( Getty Images: Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG )

"You could go back to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century where homelessness — the state of being without shelter — became viewed as a sin, as caused by the moral weakness of the homeless themselves," Dr Baker says.

Despite a brief period following the World War II, when homelessness was viewed as a structural problem requiring structural solutions, it has largely been viewed in moral terms, according to Dr Baker.

'That sinful understanding of homelessness is something that has carried through to the present day," he argues.

"And since the '70s and '80s we've really seen a resurgence of homelessness-as-moral-weakness."

Averting our gaze from poverty

Hostile architecture, just like attempts to criminalise rough sleeping, serves to displace the visibility of profound inequality, Dr Baker says, just as homelessness lays bare our complicity in that injustice.

"I think we do a lot to try to avoid thinking about that shame," he argues.

"We don't meet homeless people in the street with our eyes necessarily, we avert our gaze, and on some level, it is a sign that we feel uncomfortable about poverty.

"The lie that we tell ourselves in order to feel comfortable, is that those people did it to themselves — we didn't do it to them."

Design can, however, be used to redress the problem of urban segregation, and Mr Mackay argues that examining the corporatisation of public space is where we should start.

"There has been some lazy thinking by some local governments that have said 'that's what the private sector are doing, we should be doing that too', rather than having a more encompassing view of society," Mr Mackay says.

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He argues that local government do not exist merely to represent rate payers and stakeholders, but to serve the "broader society".

For Dr Baker, the response needs to go even further.

"There's a responsibility on the parts of people involved in creating affordable housing, in creating decent living wages, to do their part to address homelessness," he says.

If the city, as Professor Park argued, is our most enduring and successful attempt to make the world we inhabit reflect the world we desire, then hostile design should give us pause for thought.