13 Modern Marvels Invented Out of Pure Spite

One of the most common pieces of hostile architecture is the shitty fucking 45-degree benches in bus shelters. They’re so effective at preventing people from sleeping on them that you also can’t goddamn sit on the things.

There’s an art installation in Vancouver covering air vents — the kind of warmth-emitting place a freezing person might be drawn in the cold Canadian night — that, as well as looking interesting and arty, would massively injure anyone lying on it.

Even Boris Johnson — objectively a bastard — was horrified when the owners of luxury London apartments surrounded them with “anti-homeless spikes,” designed to ensure nobody has the gall to be poor within a millionaire’s eyeline.

Skateboarding — an Olympic sport btw — so horrifies some urban planners that they’ll happily put unpleasant, sharp edges on otherwise pleasant walls. Known as “pigs’ ears,” they make life more difficult for literally everyone around them. Still, fuck skateboarders, eh?

The Oregon Department of Transportation uses the phrase “aggressive landscaping” to describe the boulders it placed to move along illegal campers. The ODOT insists that spending millions on making homeless people’s lives harder is “a safety issue.” Get fucked!

Camden Borough Council in London had a new type of bench designed, specifically intended to be uncomfortable so people would sit on them for as short a time as possible. Yeah, well done, you absolute pricks. 

In Seattle in 2018, a spot under a bridge popular with homeless people was filled with bike racks, making camping there impossible. It was at no point about giving cyclists somewhere to park their bikes, and nobody pretended it was. 

In 2019, a restaurant in the Castro District placed a boulder in an entryway to stop homeless people from sheltering there. They then painted it in rainbow colors to make the nicest-looking, most inclusive mean-spirited thing that they could.

Blue lights are common in public bathrooms, designed to make it more difficult for intravenous drug users to see veins — i.e., fuck off and do your drugs elsewhere. The result? People injecting just as many drugs, but clumsily. Great!

In 2018, multiple businesses in Auckland’s central business district installed sprinklers in their doorways to go off during the night — you know, for totally non-assholey reasons. The solution to homelessness is clearly rendering homeless people wet and sick. You pricks.

The Mosquito device emits an ultra-high frequency sound, generally only audible — and unpleasantly so — to the under-25s, to stop teenagers gathering and getting up to no good. Or good. Or anything. Kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out.

Several cities in the U.K. have installed pink lights at places where teenagers hang out — deliberately unflattering lighting that makes acne more visible and draws attention to blemishes. Great! What troublemaking teens need is lower self-esteem! 

Municipal benches don’t have armrests as somewhere for you to relieve the exhaustion in your hard-working upper limbs — they’re there to make it impossible for tired homeless people to lie down. Such a simple, elegant, innovative bit of bastardry.