Stones of Injustice
The man depicted in the image above is Father Julio Lancelotti, a Catholic priest who has dedicated his life to championing the rights of unhoused people in São Paulo, Brazil. He made the news yesterday for personally taking a sledgehammer to the rocks installed under an overpass in a classic example of what is called “hostile architecture” — urban design used to regulate and limit the use of public space. In this case, design specifically used keep homeless people from camping. In a statement to the press, Father Julio described these stones, used, not to build houses but to prevent poor people from finding a place to sleep, as the “stones of injustice.”
I share this because the language in the so-called “HEAL” resolution that will be before council tomorrow (Item 49) calls on the city manager to produce “strategies and an implementation plan for disallowing camping … not relying on policing or issuance of citations.” The language talks about revisiting the camping ban, and potentially creating “appropriate signage” for places where camping is disallowed. How this will possibly be enforced without relying on the police is one of the many gray and potentially nonsensical parts of the new language added to the resolution.
One possibility is that the city may resort to the creation of more hostile architectural strategies to prevent camping. They may or may not look like the stones featured in the image below, or spikes, bolts or any other deliberately uninviting features designed to reinforce the idea that poor people should not be allowed to exist in public. These features will help the city look and feel like a paranoid, hostile, and aggressive space. These will be our own “stones of injustice.”
This so-called “hostile urbanism” is one physical manifestation of a punitive worldview, diverting resources from support and restoration and channeling them into punishment, designed to reinforce the principle that the only legitimate use of public space is to allow for movement (and momentary pauses) between points of consumption and production. In other words, if you don’t produce and/or consume, then you do not deserve to exist. At least not where anyone can see you.
All the time wasted assigning the city manager to these ridiculous gestural solutions, could be dedicated to finding ways to radically increase our units of supportive housing, and to providing Austin with clear stats about how the city is spending its resources, how many units we are projected to create, and how many more we need to create in order to meet the need, etc. A public facing dashboard with transparent and updated data could help residents of Austin better understand where we are at, what the clogs are, and what needs to be done to solve the problem. But bandages alone do not “HEAL,” and the city should not become a place of fear and hostility.
We must thoroughly reject this punitive, aggressive, hostile logic. Austin can and should be better than this.
