wait I'm confused how is the top middle picture anti-homeless architecture
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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Folks lie on those vents in the winter because they're warm. Putting stuff in the way makes that harder
Homeless people sleep on the vents for warmth.
The vents are still accessible though? And you have these near mannequins to hang your stuff?
Let them eat cake. Try sleeping on them and report back to us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture
I feel like we're talking past each other. I'm wondering how the weird human-shaped things added on top of the vents constitute hostile architecture - how are they meant to to discourage people from sleeping there? This is me trying to learn, I'm very aware that sleeping on vents isn't exactly comfortable but how do these things make it less so?
how do these things make it less [comfortable]?
You already answered your own question:
weird human-shaped things added on top of the vents
It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.
https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/unpleasant-design-hostile-architecture/
I also came across some inventive designs that I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as metal silhouettes soldered on top of warm ventilation exhausts at a CTrain station (below), a place where you could consider camping for the night.
Metal silhouettes prevent homeless people from sleeping over these CTrain grates in Calgary.
It’s hard to believe you’re not trolling.
I swear I'm not. It's entirely possible that I'm being slow, but I'm really just trying to understand so I can identify these things better in the future. Because I seriously don't get it, there's still plenty of room to lie down between them?
I think you’re confusing real life homelessness with a cartoon of a drunk who lies down to sleep it off for the night.
I assume what you're implying is that you can't put a tent there. Okay, why not fucking say that then? Homeless people around here rarely use tents, for reasons that I do not know because I am privileged enough to not be homeless, and they could probably just arrange their stuff around those shapes, put their mattress between them and go to sleep - which is why "tent" isn't the first thing that popped into my head.
Thank you for making me jump through hoops to understand a thing.
That guy is tripping.your questions are along the same as the ones I have. A lot of unhoused people I have seen don't have tents either.
Even so, you could drape a blanket over 3 of them and you've got yourself a free tent, so your question still stands. The dude's just an asshole
I have seen a lot of homeless in downtown Toronto who have a cart or backpack of belongings, and sleep directly on the subway vents with no tent. I get what the other guy is asking, I also don’t see how these metal silhouettes are going to stop someone sleeping on that grate.
They won't necessarily stop someone from sleeping on them entirely. It will certainly limit how they can be slept on. I imagine the point is to make it just uncomfortable enough for homeless people to look to sleep elsewhere. I also imagine that they would completely block these off if there was a quick and reasonably aesthetically pleasing way to do so without much cost. This is simply the compromise they've come to.
One of the examples of hostile architecture in the OP is bars on a park bench. Is that to prevent pitching a tent too?
Part of the hostile architecture is the hostility you receive by asking about how it is hostile.
I immediately wondered the same thing so, it's not you. The angry replies are because some people are just always looking for something/someone to be mad at.
I really doubt they're trolling, it's a real question. A person can clearly fit between the gaps and sleep.
It would block things like tents and mattresses, but it's reasonable to ask how it works if it doesn't obstruct a sleeping person.
Try sleeping on them and report back to us.
No need for that kind of talk, it's as pointless as saying "Go there and prove you can't sleep on them".
I see what you're digging at, I was confused by them too. Hostile architecture meets just plain terrible design?
Right? It looks like there was an attempt (gold star) at hostility but they still wanted it to look somewhat aesthetically pleasing and mostly forgot about the hostile part? Or maybe I'm just not seeing most of the hostile part, that's what I'm trying to figure out.
Nah I think you got it. Veiling art as hostile architecture is fairly common so I think the artist lead took over and they forgot the intent of ruining someone's ability to sleep haha
You'd probably have to lie between them instead of just looking at a photo, to assess if it's still possible.
Clearly they were put there with the intention of making it difficult/uncomfortable to lie down on the subway vent. If they were installed incompetently that doesn't make them unhostile though, it just makes them ineffective for their obviously intended purpose.
They look human like, maybe they are meant to cast a shadow or something to make people uncomfortable like somebody is watching?
There’s a literal glowie downvoting every socialist thing 😂
You dropped this sir
Have you considered that, as an admin, I have access to information about votes and user accounts that you don’t?
then why has china got so many homeless people?
Not actually democratic, thus not socialist.
seems like people who actually live in China disagree with you champ
- https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva%20images/Democracy%20Perception%20Index%202023.pdf
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
Most Americans think that too
They don't as the links I provided clearly show. Maybe actually look at the sources before replying.
That's a gish gallop, and the core premise that people believing it's democratic makes it so is incorrect.
Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.
Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn't make homes and homeless meet.
China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Capitalism is not defined by how the poor are treated, but by the economic relationships and mode of ownership.
Nordic countries have low poverty and generally good social support. Like it or not, this is achieved with private property on means of production, hence they are capitalist.
China has private property on means of production, hence it too is capitalist.
Both of them feature strong state oversight, which allows them to direct more of the capitalist profits to help the poor - which is good! But this doesn't make them "socialist".
Capitalism is defined by which class holds power in society, and in China it's demonstrably the working class. The reason the economy works in the interest of the poor is a direct result of that.
All the core economy in China is state owned, and the role of private sector continues to decline https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-private-sector-has-lost-ground-state-sector-has-gained-share-among
You might want to learn a bit about the subject you're attempting to debate here.
What your data shows is that the share of state in the economy has partially recovered in 2020's from ~30 to ~50%, after falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade. Impressive, indeed, and way ahead of most capitalist countries - but China is home to numerous giant private megacorporations, and allows many companies from abroad to build in the country.
"Who holds power" is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism. Even still, we just talked about homelessness - if workers held all the power, would there be homeless? Would there be any poor at all? Would there be overheated markets, including housing, which is one of the craziest in the world? Would there be Tencent, Alibaba, etc.? Would there be billionaires? Etc. etc. What defines "workers holding power" for you?
What is it about some leftists desperately trying to put socialist label on capitalist China - a desperate attempt to demonstrate a mighty socialist economy in the modern world? Socialist countries have lost the Cold War and are mostly not on the map anymore; there are objective reasons to that, including the fact most of the world never moved away from socialism and capitalist forces had greater capital to work with, and this does not mean socialism is bad, but currently, socialism is not represented by any large economy. That's just the fact.
You have an infantile understanding of what capitalism is. I recommend reading this article to get a bit of a perspective https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
“Who holds power” is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism.
Power isn’t abstract, and who holds it is definitional to socialism and capitalism.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_bourgeoisie
- https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/bourgeois-democracy-what-do-marxists-mean-by-this-term
if workers held all the power, would there be homeless?
Not for the most part, no. In your imagined “capitalist” China, did you just assume that they have a homelessness crisis, without even checking? Because you’re unintentionally making our case for us.
Would there be any poor at all?
You can’t go from one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world to universal wealth overnight. But they have made unprecedented progress.
- Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says [UN] Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
- China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
- At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
- China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
I did not say of a severe crisis, I just highlighted both homelessness and inflated housing prices are a thing. And under the rule of the workers, neither should be true.
Homelessness isn’t really a thing, though. As to the recent housing bubble, the Chinese state intentionally popped it and left the capitalists out to dry.
- Reuters: China Evergrande ordered to liquidate in landmark moment for crisis-hit sector
- Bloomberg: China Reiterates Stance That Homes Are Not for Speculation
- CNBC: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
.
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not captured by the private finance capitalists like the US state is.
Love how you respond to a bunch of information from the World Bank, NYT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research with a definition from Wikipedia.
Consider that you could learn more here.
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huh?
However, the people of China can afford to buy these extremely expensive properties. In fact, 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
If China is socialist then Lipton is tea.
Look into the country on the shallowest level. They have socialist programs but, honestly...
China is socialist. Socialist countries can have market economies and even capitalist economies, as long as the dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately controls all of the economy. Just a reminder China's killed multiple billionaires.
What is "so many"? Compared to whom?
I'm hiding a homeless person in my home, which is risking eviction to keep someone off the streets. Here, most tenancies don't allow you to "sublet", the landlord legally gets the final say about who lives in their property.
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