An exploration of the way our cities now hate the homeless

“Exclusionary Design”, also known as “Hostile Architecture”, are the names for the relatively modern concept of “an urban strategy that uses elements of the built environment to direct or constrain behavior”. It is particularly aimed at the homeless and young people.

Have you ever seen a concrete railing that has little metal studs all over it to stop kids from skating on it? This is hostile architecture. Have you ever wondered why more and more park benches are turning into strange and awkward shapes, full of armrests and unnatural angles? That’s because these benches are specifically designed to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them, or to keep consumers moving in a place that’s designed to take their money, not them relax.

It’s a subtle yet incredibly somber part of modern life, so obsessed with controlling spaces that are so often inherently public (train stations, parks). And they are the focus of this virtual exhibition, created by Louis Brooks called ” monuments of guilt.

“Take a first-person stroll through Monuments to Guilt, a short exhibition exploring exclusionary design,” Brooks writes of the show. “Get familiar with the core principles of this harmful practice, re-evaluate the objects you see every day, and let the blame sit on you for a little while.”

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Monuments of Guilt—made with Unreal Engine and that only takes “a few minutes” (depending on the player!) to go through – is a 500MB download on itch.io, and You can grab it here.

Note that we have covered Brooks’ work before; He was the man behind the excellent running cycles Propertywhich stripped down the walking animations of famous video game characters to their bare, rotoscoped bones, so we could “focus on nothing but shuffling shoulders and planting one foot at a time.”