Hostile architecture in Montreal’s public spaces

Exploring the role of design in shaping Montreal’s urban interactions

NewsZosia — Published February 11, 2025 4 minutes

These initiatives aim to increase accessibility to the city’s public spaces and parks by utilizing designs that influence behaviour. 

With these design interventions and a focus on public municipal programming, some are saying that public spaces risk becoming increasingly structured and hostile. 

The term hostile architecture or defensive design refers to urban design that intends to restrict certain behaviours in public spaces. 

According to Assim Mohammed, a graduate of McGill University’s Master of Urban Planning program, what makes defensive design choices “hostile” and the subject of public criticism is based on individual perception, not a static characteristic. 

“A person might see a bench with armrests and not really think anything of it,” Mohammed said, “but the same person might look at the bench with barriers and more clearly define it as hostile architecture.” 

Mohammed added that bars between benches can also function as armrests as an accessibility accommodation. 

In 2021, bars on benches in Boston’s metro system were subject to debate, with the transit authority citing that the feature increased accessibility to its senior and disabled riders.

Despite following accessibility recommendations, a representative of the disability advocacy organization that helped with the design shared that, although armrests were important, the impact on unhoused people couldn’t be ignored. 

“Not all armrests on benches are deliberately designed to be hostile, but they can be perceived as such because they are hostile to transient and unhoused people,” Mohammed said.

Zy St-Pierre-Bourdelais, a master's student in architecture at Université de Montréal and an activist for inclusive architecture, said that architects base their designs on the client’s vision for how a space should be used.

“The client wants something [that] will actually dictate a way of living, a way of studying, a way of resting in the park. [There are] way more actions that were dictated than we think when we arrive in a space. It was mostly all planned,” St-Pierre-Bourdelais says. 

“Our behaviour in public spaces is regulated by active and passive choices made during the design process,” said Concordia University design professor Jeremy Petrus. “While physical barriers can be classified as active elements that directly dictate a behaviour, passive design subtly influences it.”

Located on Ste. Catherine St. near Atwater Metro Station, Cabot Square is an urban park that the city’s unhoused population frequents. This is partly due to its proximity to shelters and outreach organizations such as Chez Doris and Resilience Montreal. 

In June 2020, a bench in Cabot Square received online criticism based on its perceived hostility. The bench was not new, but a painted sign limiting the time people could sit altered its public perception. 
 

Les Nocturnes is an outreach group working with vulnerable populations in the Guy-Concordia and Cabot Square areas. According to Jay Vanisle, a street worker with the group, a new wave of hostile design is emerging in Montreal that is modifying spaces unhoused people call home. 

Curving around the elevated planters of Cabot Square are a series of wooden planters. Across their seating area are protruding metal ridges that only permit sitting, making lying down on the benches more difficult. 

“When it's obvious, then there is backlash. But if it's a subtle detail […] folks who never try to lay down on the bench might never notice,” Vanisle said. 

Ryan Francom, of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia and the Montreal community initiative Food Against Fascism, points to the skating rink at Cabot Square as another example of development within city parks being used to limit the activity of unhoused people. 

With the rink being a public facility, the city can control the use of the park for the winter season by maintaining programming. 

“[Unhoused people] are constantly being chased out of spaces: be it metro stations, doorways and building entrances, fast food restaurants,” Vanisle said. “In absence of conventional housing, these are their homes, their social spaces.” 

The hostile nature of city planning goes past infrastructure design. It is also reflected by increases in security measures and police presence as a form of implicit intimidation. 

In 2022, the SPVM proposed to install new security cameras in different areas throughout the city, including Cabot Square, as a preventative measure against “violent crime.” 

According to Francom, this security infrastructure can make it easier for the police to monitor people and even remove them from specific spaces if they linger or use them in ways the city does not want. 

“[Surveillance] is part of the guidebook of architecture now when you plan a building or public space,” Petrus said. 

He added that, like the physical barriers on the benches, surveillance can shape the public’s behaviour to align with the ones intended by the public or private entities that oversee the space. 

“Hostile architecture doesn't really stop people from using spaces,” Francom said. ”They just make the space more miserable to be in.”

With files from Claudia Beaudoin.
 

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 9, published February 11, 2025.