The Olympics' Hostile Architecture Is a Preview of What's to Come

On a graffiti-stained sidewalk in Paris, a unusual show appeared days earlier the Olympic opening ceremony successful July: Around 40 elephantine cement Lego-like blocks successful neat rows beneath the Pont de Stains, a span successful the bluish suburb of Aubervilliers that connects 2 Olympic sites, the Stade de France and the Parc des Nations.

This spot utilized to beryllium a stateless encampment, wherever astir 100 people, galore of them migrants, lived successful tents. Then on July 17, the constabulary arrived and instructed everyone to leave, arsenic portion of a cleanup cognition successful which authorities enactment stateless people, members of the Roma community, migrants, and enactment workers on buses to different cities, specified arsenic Bordeaux oregon Toulouse.

Once the authorities emptied the area, according to activists, the immovable blocks of factual were installed successful spot of the tents, ending immoderate conception the erstwhile residents whitethorn 1 time beryllium capable to return.

Campaigners accidental these bricks are an illustration of hostile architecture, a word utilized to picture immoderate of the astir disposable changes cities and companies marque to deter stateless radical loitering oregon sleeping connected their properties. “This is not new, but it has been intensified successful a precise circumstantial mode during the Olympics,” says Antoine de Clerck, portion of Le Revers de la Médaille, a radical of activists raising consciousness of however marginalized radical are treated during the Olympic Games.

“We bash not advocator for encampments and squats and shantytowns,” adds de Clerck. “But to eradicate them, you person to find alternate semipermanent solutions.”

Despite different examples of hostile architecture successful Paris, including picnic tables installed wherever radical utilized to sleep, it is the elephantine Lego-style blocks that person proved astir controversial. “I haven’t seen thing rather similar this,” says Jules Boykoff, a prof and erstwhile nonrecreational shot subordinate who studies the interaction of the Olympics connected marginalized communities. “Typically, hostile architecture is much subtle,” helium says, “like a curved autobus seat that makes it little comfy for idiosyncratic to sleep.”