Papers by Christopher Giamarino
PhD Dissertation, 2023
In this dissertation, I explore the expansion of hostile designs as conceptualized zones of anti-... more In this dissertation, I explore the expansion of hostile designs as conceptualized zones of anti-homelessness and the production of do-it-yourself urban design interventions as tactical responses (i.e., community infrastructure and mutual aid services)—employing mapping, photography, and conversations with unhoused residents in Los Angeles. Historically, scholars have investigated the criminalization of homelessness, achieved through the enforcement of anti-homeless ordinances and the spatial banishment of unhoused individuals. Less study has gone to hostile regulations and spatial design conditions in shelter spaces and public spaces that shrink the capabilities of unhoused individuals to access bare necessities, partake in life-sustaining activities, and realize socio-spatial rights to the city and its public spaces. To intervene in this gap, I review an emerging suite of strategies—quality-of-life ordinances, spatial policing, and hostile soft and hard design controls—that exist across Los Angeles’ anti-homeless landscape. Across four neighborhoods, I interviewed 36 unhoused individuals to understand their experiences with anti-homeless zones and responses to hostile designs within shelters and in public spaces. Additionally, I catalogued the grassroots construction of residential and community infrastructure by unhoused individuals. My key argument is that hostile designs encourage and, ultimately, criminalize and demolish DIY urban design interventions that seek to respond to conditions of homelessness. Hostile designs across shelters and public spaces shrink the socio-spatial rights of unhoused residents to access public spaces and realize capabilities allowing them to partake in life-sustaining activities. I advance the concept of “dwellable inhabitance,” which is a capability afforded through regulation and urban design that allows individuals to appropriate public space so that they can partake in life-sustaining activities when no accessible or reasonable alternatives exist. Here, I critique the processes and outcomes of hostile designs that reproduce homelessness, as experienced by unhoused residents and their DIY urban design responses. Then, grounded in the recommendations and demands of unhoused residents, I suggest how hostile designs can be transformed into just public space designs. My suggested policy and design recommendations follow an inclusive justice framework that addresses distributive, procedural, interactional, and recognitional aspects of justice, as well as care and repair considerations. Instead of fencing off parks, closing public restrooms, and criminalizing non-criminal activities like sleeping, cooking, or hanging out, I advocate for the abolition of hostile designs and recommend that city planners and urban designers should accommodate DIY urban design interventions to render public spaces in LA more socially, politically, and spatially accessible places that provide compassionate services and opportunities for housing.
Journal of the American Planning Association
Urban Affairs Review, Mar 22, 2023
This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spa... more This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spatial banishment strategies and their impacts on unhoused folks' basic freedoms. First, we review debates on co-existing geographies of punishment and care through theoretical and legal lenses. Focusing on sixteen cities in the United States, we examine categories of anti-homeless ordinances and their evolution in the past two decades. Next, we focus on Los Angeles and use archival research and interviews with activists to examine the expansion of newly emerging anti-homeless spaces. Our research details ad hoc strategies of spatial banishment targeting homelessness. We find that the city represents a fragmented landscape of "no-gozones" for the unhoused. We posit that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled various spatial banishment strategies and that Los Angeles is neo-revanchist. We advocate for city policies that abolish spatial banishment strategies and respond to the needs of the unhoused.
Journal of Urban Design
COVID-19 has revealed limitations in traditional public space research methods. There is a need f... more COVID-19 has revealed limitations in traditional public space research methods. There is a need for new approaches to study and intervene during times of crisis. Interdisciplinary urban humanities approaches can help researchers respond to pandemic public space dynamics. This article develops a framework linking urban humanities practices – thick mapping, filmic sensing, and digital storytelling – to the production of space at multiple scales. A case study is presented of a course that employed these methods and proposed speculative design interventions to accommodate street vending, skateboarding, and unhoused people in the Westlake neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Cities & Health
Skateboarding is a popular form of active transportation and recreation that reinterprets the use... more Skateboarding is a popular form of active transportation and recreation that reinterprets the use of public obstacles like stairs, rails, and planters for play. Through active leisure, skateboarding provides physiological, social, and emotional benefits. However, cities regulate and design out the activity through legal and architectural interventions, citing injury liability, property damage, and nuisance as justifications. In this paper, we focus on the impacts of hostile architecture and urban design in restricting skateboarding, and thus reducing opportunities to engage in cardiovascular exercise. While hostile designs target populations like unhoused people from using public space, there is little evidence of their effects on skateboarding in universities. Therefore, this paper comparatively analyses the extent of hostile designs and their impacts on skateboarding as a novel form of physical activity in three public universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Comparing photographs and autoethnographic accounts, we argue campuses disproportionately target skateboarding for exclusion. We find that exclusion is legitimized through temporary events and safety and damage concerns. Given the health benefits of skateboarding, we recommend skate-friendly interventions that address these concerns, create shared campus space, and reimagine universities as inclusive places for all modes of active transportation and recreation.
The MIT Press eBooks, Nov 22, 2022
Urban Affairs Review, 2023
This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spa... more This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spatial banishment strategies and their impacts on unhoused folks' basic freedoms. First, we review debates on co-existing geographies of punishment and care through theoretical and legal lenses. Focusing on sixteen cities in the United States, we examine categories of anti-homeless ordinances and their evolution in the past two decades. Next, we focus on Los Angeles and use archival research and interviews with activists to examine the expansion of newly emerging anti-homeless spaces. Our research details ad hoc strategies of spatial banishment targeting homelessness. We find that the city represents a fragmented landscape of "no-gozones" for the unhoused. We posit that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled various spatial banishment strategies and that Los Angeles is neo-revanchist. We advocate for city policies that abolish spatial banishment strategies and respond to the needs of the unhoused.
Journal of Urban Design, 2023
COVID-19 has revealed limitations in traditional public space
research methods. There is a need f... more COVID-19 has revealed limitations in traditional public space
research methods. There is a need for new approaches to study
and intervene during times of crisis. Interdisciplinary urban humanities approaches can help researchers respond to pandemic public
space dynamics. This article develops a framework linking urban
humanities practices – thick mapping, filmic sensing, and digital
storytelling – to the production of space at multiple scales. A case
study is presented of a course that employed these methods and
proposed speculative design interventions to accommodate street
vending, skateboarding, and unhoused people in the Westlake
neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Cities & Health, 2023
Skateboarding is a popular form of active transportation and recreation that reinterprets the use... more Skateboarding is a popular form of active transportation and recreation that reinterprets the use of public obstacles like stairs, rails, and planters for play. Through active leisure, skateboarding provides physiological, social, and emotional benefits. However, cities regulate and design out the activity through legal and architectural interventions, citing injury liability, property damage, and nuisance as justifications. In this paper, we focus on the impacts of hostile architecture and urban design in restricting skateboarding, and thus reducing opportunities to engage in cardiovascular exercise. While hostile designs target populations like unhoused people from using public space, there is little evidence of their effects on skateboarding in universities. Therefore, this paper comparatively analyses the extent of hostile designs and their impacts on skateboarding as a novel form of physical activity in three public universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Comparing photographs and autoethnographic accounts, we argue campuses disproportionately target skateboarding for exclusion. We find that exclusion is legitimized through temporary events and safety and damage concerns. Given the health benefits of skateboarding, we recommend skate-friendly interventions that address these concerns, create shared campus space, and reimagine universities as inclusive places for all modes of active transportation and recreation.
Housing Policy Debate, 2022
Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of indivi... more Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of individuals. Many scholars have studied people living in homeless shelters and outdoors in tents. An overlooked population is the growing number of the unhoused living in vehicles. We draw on data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Demographic Survey to understand the characteristics of people living in vehicles and the extent to which they differ from the nonvehicular unhoused population. Compared to those living in tents, in makeshift shelters, and in public spaces, people living in vehicles are more likely to be women and to live in larger households with children, and are less likely to be chronically unhoused. These findings will help effectively target policies and services. Safe parking programs can provide temporary relief to those living in vehicles and, if done well, the interventions necessary to transition into permanent housing.
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2023
Problem, research strategy, and findings:
Shelter is a necessity, yet approximately 17 out of e... more Problem, research strategy, and findings:
Shelter is a necessity, yet approximately 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States are unhoused. Public attention to homelessness has centered on individuals sitting and sleeping in public spaces. However, as many as 50% of the unsheltered live in vehicles. For people sleeping in vehicles, finding a safe place to park is an ongoing challenge, further complicated by the growing number of ordinances restricting vehicular dwelling. We drew on point-in-time count data from the Los Angeles (CA) Homeless Services Authority to examine spatial patterns of vehicular homelessness in Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020. We tested the relationship between the presence of vehicle regulations and the number of people sleeping in vehicles. Although the data likely underestimated vehicular homelessness, we found that ordinances directly reduced the number of people living in vehicles in particular census tracts. On average, cities with citywide and overnight bans had greater impacts on people sleeping in vehicles than cities with less restrictive ordinances. However, the indirect effects in neighboring tracts were stronger and demonstrate the role of these ordinances in simply shifting the vehicular homeless between areas.
Takeaway for practice:
Given the slow pace of delivering permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness, cities should reduce the harm and precariousness of living in vehicles. Strategies to do this include the reform of punitive vehicle towing and vehicle dwelling regulations. Safe parking programs can provide individuals with a safe place to park their vehicles at night, offer ancillary services, and deter harassment from neighborhood residents and the police. Longer term, transformative change will require additional policies and programs to place people into permanently affordable housing.
Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Jun 2019
Neoliberal urbanism often draws critiques because it privatizes public space and excludes specifi... more Neoliberal urbanism often draws critiques because it privatizes public space and excludes specific social groups whose interests are not in line with the development goals of local states and corporations. This article, through an exploration of the politics and discourses of urban skateboarding, suggests that this clear distinction, between entrepreneurialism and community–based place making, may fail to explain transformative changes occurring in public space today. Comparing two grassroots activist campaigns at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City (NYC) and West LA Courthouse in the city of Los Angeles (LA), this article explains the ways in which skateboarders leverage specific neoliberal ideologies to claim their right to these two settings. In both cases, skateboarders save spaces through entrepreneurial urban means that bolster neoliberal values while retaining the tactical nature of their activities. Although both activist movements pursue the common values of authenticity, entrepreneurship, and private funding, they employ different discourses to reclaim public space. The NYC skaters frame a security discourse, which ultimately limits their continual access to the Brooklyn Banks. The LA skate community, on the contrary, constructs a spontaneity discourse, characterized by creativity, conviviality, and civil society, successfully transforming the West LA Courthouse into a legalized skate plaza. Our findings suggest that skateboarding communities and their spatial activism are resilient enough to articulate different rationales and successfully fight to transform public spaces into urban commons. However, we argue that ‘the discourses’ matter significantly in the processes and outcomes of activist mobilizations occurring within neoliberalizing public space.
Today, street skateboarding has transformed from a subcultural pursuit to a mainstream urban ende... more Today, street skateboarding has transformed from a subcultural pursuit to a mainstream urban endeavor, as more than 50 million people partake in the activity globally. Cities respond to skateboarders’ spatial movements by imposing contradictory legal prescriptions and physical design barriers in public and private spaces. The point of departure for this thesis is that planning reactions provide subpar public skate spaces while imposing regulations that ban/stigmatize skateboarding outside of these sanctioned skate spots. A sizable population is denied their full right to the city, proscribed from partaking in the everyday organicism of democratic spatial experience and life. These exclusionary planning/design practices/regulations warranted further investigation. The purpose of this research was to undertake an ethno-geographic inquiry into skateboarders’ performances and transgressions in two public skateparks and two privately-owned plazas in Los Angeles, CA. My research questions were: What can planners learn from a ethno-geographic analysis of a subculture in space? Are current planning practices and engagement strategies allowing skateboarders to have citizen control and dictate how spaces are designed in order to provide quality, designated skate/recreational facilities? What planning tools and policies can provide multi-use, just spaces that celebrate diverse, cultural consumption and the social production of space? I conducted mixed methods research (i.e., field observations, interviews, photography, behavior mapping) following an actor-network theory (ANT) framework, rejecting the separation of humans/nonhumans, embracing materiality, and seeing space as a heterogeneous assemblage of constituent fluid realities/forms. I analyzed my findings through Lefebvre’s trialectic conceptualization of space. Skateboarders’ artistic spatial performances provide spectacles, reinterpret the functionality of objects, and transgress planned regulatory/physical boundaries. Ubiquitous handrails, stairs, and ledges as well as challenges posed by exclusionary spaces motivate skaters to blur traditional binaries of appropriate/inappropriate users in public/private spaces. Motivated by Sandercock’s (2004) challenge for more imaginative planning and Beauregard’s (2003) call to incorporate diverse storytelling and discursive democracy to build bases for collective planning action, I encourage planners to expand their politics, be creatively audacious, and adopt therapeutic tools for planning in 21st-century cities. I recommend one strategic occupation tactic for skateboarders to performatively represent themselves and engender planning responses. Using traditional planning tools (i.e., zoning incentives, engagement workshops, programming), I recommend four policies for cities to plan, design, and celebrate equitable, vibrant spaces where diverse publics can produce social space, create spectacles for cultural consumption, and represent themselves as legitimate actors in everyday urban life.
Books by Christopher Giamarino
Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City, 2022
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Papers by Christopher Giamarino
research methods. There is a need for new approaches to study
and intervene during times of crisis. Interdisciplinary urban humanities approaches can help researchers respond to pandemic public
space dynamics. This article develops a framework linking urban
humanities practices – thick mapping, filmic sensing, and digital
storytelling – to the production of space at multiple scales. A case
study is presented of a course that employed these methods and
proposed speculative design interventions to accommodate street
vending, skateboarding, and unhoused people in the Westlake
neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Shelter is a necessity, yet approximately 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States are unhoused. Public attention to homelessness has centered on individuals sitting and sleeping in public spaces. However, as many as 50% of the unsheltered live in vehicles. For people sleeping in vehicles, finding a safe place to park is an ongoing challenge, further complicated by the growing number of ordinances restricting vehicular dwelling. We drew on point-in-time count data from the Los Angeles (CA) Homeless Services Authority to examine spatial patterns of vehicular homelessness in Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020. We tested the relationship between the presence of vehicle regulations and the number of people sleeping in vehicles. Although the data likely underestimated vehicular homelessness, we found that ordinances directly reduced the number of people living in vehicles in particular census tracts. On average, cities with citywide and overnight bans had greater impacts on people sleeping in vehicles than cities with less restrictive ordinances. However, the indirect effects in neighboring tracts were stronger and demonstrate the role of these ordinances in simply shifting the vehicular homeless between areas.
Takeaway for practice:
Given the slow pace of delivering permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness, cities should reduce the harm and precariousness of living in vehicles. Strategies to do this include the reform of punitive vehicle towing and vehicle dwelling regulations. Safe parking programs can provide individuals with a safe place to park their vehicles at night, offer ancillary services, and deter harassment from neighborhood residents and the police. Longer term, transformative change will require additional policies and programs to place people into permanently affordable housing.
Books by Christopher Giamarino
research methods. There is a need for new approaches to study
and intervene during times of crisis. Interdisciplinary urban humanities approaches can help researchers respond to pandemic public
space dynamics. This article develops a framework linking urban
humanities practices – thick mapping, filmic sensing, and digital
storytelling – to the production of space at multiple scales. A case
study is presented of a course that employed these methods and
proposed speculative design interventions to accommodate street
vending, skateboarding, and unhoused people in the Westlake
neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Shelter is a necessity, yet approximately 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States are unhoused. Public attention to homelessness has centered on individuals sitting and sleeping in public spaces. However, as many as 50% of the unsheltered live in vehicles. For people sleeping in vehicles, finding a safe place to park is an ongoing challenge, further complicated by the growing number of ordinances restricting vehicular dwelling. We drew on point-in-time count data from the Los Angeles (CA) Homeless Services Authority to examine spatial patterns of vehicular homelessness in Los Angeles from 2016 to 2020. We tested the relationship between the presence of vehicle regulations and the number of people sleeping in vehicles. Although the data likely underestimated vehicular homelessness, we found that ordinances directly reduced the number of people living in vehicles in particular census tracts. On average, cities with citywide and overnight bans had greater impacts on people sleeping in vehicles than cities with less restrictive ordinances. However, the indirect effects in neighboring tracts were stronger and demonstrate the role of these ordinances in simply shifting the vehicular homeless between areas.
Takeaway for practice:
Given the slow pace of delivering permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness, cities should reduce the harm and precariousness of living in vehicles. Strategies to do this include the reform of punitive vehicle towing and vehicle dwelling regulations. Safe parking programs can provide individuals with a safe place to park their vehicles at night, offer ancillary services, and deter harassment from neighborhood residents and the police. Longer term, transformative change will require additional policies and programs to place people into permanently affordable housing.