30) The deviant places.

It’s easy to move through our cities without seeing these power plays, enacted through design and policy, that keep the predicament of the homeless, poor, or the impaired  conveniently out of view. A lack of accurate information about human-rights issues is one of the biggest deterrents to human-rights empowerment. There are architectural deterrents on every corner and we take no notice of them at all, remaining entirely unaware of the social role of these devices. What are they? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn’t seem to be right? I sat with different people around the world who suffer discrimination and talked to them.

Spikes are a form of homeless deterrent strategy. This is a kind of human-right abuse right under our nose, that we don’t even notice. Disabled people face multiple exclusions. We have a large potential workforce of skilled and talented people who are unable to contribute to society—economically, socially or civically—because of arch barriers to full participation. The structural features of urban life, such as crowding, almost automatically contribute to higher rates of human rights abuses, regardless of who is living in these neighborhoods. By inhabiting space, individuals can breathe the injustice that surrounds them. Less trees and buildings constructed from materials that retain heat are health hazards for women, children, and the elderly. Car parking and highways are deterrents to pedestrians and impede a more sustainable urban lifestyle. These structural features can include public buildings and open areas, but also streets and places to gather, meet, and interact, where people affirm their shared rights to the city. They can be labelled as private or public.

Architecture should improve the conditions of these interactions in order to strengthen the minimum standards of basic individual rights. Design is so fundamental in dealing with changes in everyday life and it plays such an important part in influencing, tackling, and improving social issues that human rights should always be prioritized. Every person living in a city should be allowed to interact with the environment in a way that’s meaningful to them. The existence of deviant places are a more pervasive problem that can’t always be directly observed. These require us to address and dismantle the deviant place or barrier, so that every person is able to access the right to live independently, to feel respected, and to enjoy an adequate standard of living. The places that we hate the most are often the places that are designed specifically for us.

Architecture also enacts power, which is defined as the relationship between two forces and can be viewed as a dynamic of balance or a struggle. Identifying power in architecture and city development opens dialogues about the values and ideologies represented by these types of power and about how we are controlled by and how we control space. Under the privatization of many traditionally public functions and through public/private development projects, public and private realms overlap and blur their conventional boundaries. Furthermore, the public realm includes both collective concerns, meaning shared interests, and community functions, which refers to special interest groups such as a neighborhood or the environmental community. This means creating spaces and buildings that are more affordable, people-centered, peaceful, safe, healthy, green, and more respectful of human needs and abilities, of privacy, of different types of lifestyles, and of different cultural values. That is to say, we must develop the conditions of housing, education, health, work, to enhance the economic, politic, social, and cultural life of the society. As place of empowerment, architecture influences our encounters with strangers and with the others, which is a fundamental condition of cities, places where otherness and strangeness prevail.