If you are homeless, and cannot sleep over a heat vent, will you die? The odds are against it unless you are in a country with a frigid winter season, the night is bitterly cold and an emergency shelter is out of the question. Most likely, you will huddle somewhere, in pain. (Though if you become drowsy, feel only numbness, or drowsiness, you may indeed be on the road to death.)
Imagine instead you are a professional designing or building a grating that fits over a heat vent, that prevents a homeless person from lying on it. In that case, are you an industrial designer? An architect? An engineer? Or are you a torturer?
Before giving in to an inclination to wave away this torture question as preposterous, we are talking here about inflicting injury to people limited in their ability to fend off hostile actions of any kind, or even to move away to a distance. And it should also be borne in mind that something as apparently benign as sleep deprivation has been demonstrated to be a very effective form of torture.
The torture question is one we should ask more frequently if we may be guided by the response of staff at the Toronto General Hospital when a structure was installed in front of the building. Read more in the Toronto Star: ‘Hostile architecture’ a growing problem for the homeless, advocates say.
The problem is cropping up in more places than Toronto, Canada. Read a survey of this ugly phenomenon in the Architectural Digest: What’s Behind the Uptick in Hostile Architecture?
