Last year, students from an Australian university reached out for my thoughts on Hostile Architecture. It was for a journalism course studying Los Angeles’s houseless crisis. The group wanted to ensure their research acknowledged the hostile and defensive design targeting unhoused Angelenos.
Given our timezone differences and mutual capacity limits, we agreed to do the interview asynchronously over email. They sent a questionnaire. I reflected on each question, prepared my responses, and hit “send” days later. When the term ended, the students shared their final project, a thoroughly researched website investigating the causes and consequences of being unhoused in LA.