Is There Such a Thing as Hostile Architecture in Aquatics?
Once you learn what hostile architecture is, you start seeing it everywhere. A public bench has a metal divider positioned exactly where someone would need to lie down. A ledge is angled just enough that nobody can comfortably sit on it. Boulders fill the dry space beneath an overpass. A plaza contains almost no seating. A park has plenty of open space but nowhere shaded to stay for long.
These choices are sometimes described as hostile architecture, defensive design, exclusionary design, or unpleasant design. The basic idea is that the built environment can quietly encourage some behaviors while making others difficult or impossible. Hostile architecture is most commonly discussed in relation to people experiencing homelessness, particularly designs intended to prevent sleeping, resting, or remaining in public spaces. Scholars including Robert Rosenberger have examined how ordinary objects such as benches, fences, signage, and other pieces of public infrastructure can carry political and social decisions about who public space is really for. (University of Minnesota Press)
The more I read about hostile architecture, though, the more I keep coming back to an aquatics question: Does hostile aquatic architecture exist?
I am not convinced we have a neat definition yet, and I am definitely not suggesting that every inconvenient pool design, splash pad, admission fee, or operational decision deserves to be called hostile architecture. The term should mean something.
But I do think aquatic professionals should be curious about whether the same underlying question applies to our spaces:
Can the design of a public aquatic environment quietly determine who is expected to use it, how they are allowed to use it, and whether certain people are encouraged to stay away? That feels like a conversation worth having!
What Hostile Architecture Actually Means
Hostile architecture is not simply bad architecture. An uncomfortable bench is not necessarily hostile. A fence is not inherently exclusionary. An armrest may improve accessibility for one person while preventing another person from lying down. Public spaces involve legitimate questions about circulation, safety, maintenance, sanitation, conflicting uses, and the needs of different users.
The more useful distinction is intent and effect.
Robert Rosenberger describes hostile design as public-space objects that can target vulnerable groups, while other scholars have examined how design pushes particular behaviors, and ultimately particular people, out of public space. The familiar examples include divided benches, anti-sleeping spikes, anti-skateboarding devices, angled surfaces, and other physical features that quietly enforce rules without requiring anyone to verbally tell a person to leave. (Sage Journals)
A 2026 public-space evaluation framework developed for Manhattan Community Board 3 describes hostile and exclusionary design as features that restrict certain uses of public space and notes that the effects can extend beyond people experiencing homelessness to older adults and disabled people. That is important because exclusionary design often has spillover effects. A bench designed to stop someone from sleeping may also be harder for a larger person to use. Removing seating to discourage loitering also removes a resting place for someone with limited stamina. (New York City Government)
That is where the conversation gets interesting for parks and recreation professionals.
Design does not just tell people what a space looks like. It tells people what they are allowed to do there.
Aquatics Has Always Been About More Than Water
Swimming pools are unusually rich public spaces because they sit at the intersection of recreation, bodies, safety, social interaction, public health, employment, and community life.
Jeff Wiltse's Contested Waters is particularly useful here. His history of municipal swimming pools shows that pools have never been neutral containers of water. Their locations, admission fees, rules, schedules, architecture, and operating practices have all helped determine which social groups could use them and under what circumstances. Wiltse documents, for example, how early municipal pools could be segregated by class through both location and admission fees, and how race later shaped pool access, desegregation, privatization, disinvestment, and closure. (The University of North Carolina Press)
His work also emphasizes the potential of municipal swimming pools to function as meaningful public spaces where different groups interact, while showing how often pools instead reproduced existing racial, class, gender, and generational divisions. That history makes me hesitant to treat aquatic architecture as though it is only engineering.
Where we put the pool matters.
What we build instead of a pool matters.
Where people can sit matters.
Whether there is shade matters.
How long someone is allowed to stay matters.
Whether someone can enter without paying matters.
Whether the facility has somewhere for a teenager to exist without purchasing a program matters.
Whether someone can actually get into the water matters.
Those are design decisions, but they are also decisions about public life.
Is “Aquatic Hostile Architecture” the Right Term?
Maybe. I think we should be cautious about declaring every inequitable aquatic decision hostile architecture, because the traditional concept usually involves design specifically intended to control or exclude particular uses or users.
There is a difference between intentional exclusion, design that has exclusionary effects, and ordinary underinvestment.
For example, a city might install fencing specifically to stop teenagers from gathering around a fountain after hours. That looks fairly close to defensive design. A recreation department might build a pool without adequate shade because the project ran over budget. The outcome may disproportionately affect people who cannot tolerate prolonged sun exposure, but calling that hostile architecture may overstate the intent. And a city might replace an aging pool with a splash pad because the splash pad is cheaper to construct, staff, insure, or operate. That may reflect legitimate budget realities rather than a deliberate attempt to keep anyone from learning to swim.
But even when the intent is not hostile, the distribution of what gets built still deserves scrutiny.
Sasha Costanza-Chock's work on design justice is helpful here because it shifts the question from simply whether designers meant well toward who receives the benefits and burdens of design decisions, whose knowledge counts, and who participates in making those decisions. Design justice explicitly asks how design can reproduce or challenge structural inequality. (Design Justice)
That may be the more productive frame for aquatics.
Maybe the question is not always: “Is this hostile architecture?”
Maybe it is: “Who does this design work well for, who does it work poorly for, and who was missing when we decided?”
Splash Pads Are Where This Gets Complicated
I love splash pads. My son, Anderson, really loved splash pads. They can be joyful public spaces. They can introduce young children to water. They can provide free or inexpensive summer recreation, offer heat relief, activate parks, and create aquatic play opportunities without some of the risks and operational requirements of a traditional pool.
The CDC describes splash pads as venues designed to spray or jet water on users, often without accumulating standing water specifically to reduce drowning risk. (CDC)
So this is not an anti-splash-pad argument. But I think we should be willing to ask a harder question when communities repeatedly replace traditional public swimming pools with splash pads, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods: What aquatic function did the community lose, and what function did it get back?
A splash pad provides water play.
It does not provide lap swimming.
It does not provide meaningful deep-water experience.
It does not support conventional swim lessons in the way a pool does.
It does not create the same pathway to competitive swimming, lifeguarding, swim instruction, water exercise, or development of broad water competency.
You cannot learn to navigate deep water in a facility intentionally designed not to contain it.
That does not make the splash pad bad.
It means a splash pad and a swimming pool are not interchangeable public resources.
Same Category of Project, Very Different Public Benefit
Splash Pad Can Provide | Traditional Pool Can Also Provide |
Water play | Formal swimming instruction |
Cooling during hot weather | Deep-water competency |
Low-barrier family recreation | Lifeguard skill development |
Early comfort around water | Lap swimming |
Interactive sensory play | Competitive swimming |
Park activation | Water exercise |
Lower-drowning-risk play environment | Diving and deeper-water experience |
Community gathering | Aquatic employment pipeline |
The appropriate question is not whether every neighborhood deserves an Olympic-size pool instead of a splash pad. It is whether communities with fewer resources are consistently offered water play instead of swimming infrastructure, while wealthier communities retain facilities where residents can actually develop aquatic competency.
If that pattern exists, it deserves examination.
When “Cheaper to Operate” Becomes an Equity Question
Municipalities operate within real budgets, and pools are expensive. They require trained staff, mechanical systems, water treatment, utilities, maintenance, insurance, accessibility infrastructure, and long-term capital investment. Splash pads can sometimes provide recreational water access with substantially different operational demands. Those realities matter.
Still, equity requires us to notice when financial logic is applied unevenly. Imagine two neighborhoods. In one, an aging pool receives a major renovation because residents organize around preserving it, property values are high, and there is strong political support for aquatic programming. In another, an aging pool is demolished and replaced with a spray feature because rebuilding a pool is deemed financially unrealistic. Both decisions may have reasonable explanations. But over decades, those reasonable decisions can accumulate into a map where some children grow up surrounded by places to become swimmers while others grow up surrounded by places to get wet. That is not a trivial distinction.
Jeff Wiltse's research on the decline of municipal pools shows how desegregation, suburbanization, privatization, deferred maintenance, and successive waves of pool closures contributed to the disappearance of public aquatic infrastructure. (National Geographic)
We should be careful not to reproduce that pattern under a new, seemingly neutral vocabulary of operational efficiency.
What Else Might Aquatic Hostile Design Look Like?
If we use the concept carefully, I can think of several areas aquatic professionals might examine. I would not automatically label every example below hostile architecture. I would use them as questions about design, behavior control, access, and belonging.
Possible Aquatic Examples Worth Examining
Design or Operational Choice | Question Worth Asking |
Almost no seating around a public splash pad | Are we discouraging caregivers, older adults, or people with disabilities from staying? |
No shaded seating | Who can comfortably remain here during extreme heat? |
Fencing with only one distant entrance | Does security design create unnecessary access barriers? |
No seating outside changing rooms | Where does someone with limited stamina wait for family? |
Removing benches because teenagers gather there | Are we solving behavior by eliminating places for young people to exist? |
Very limited free deck space | Does every person need to be participating in a paid activity to belong here? |
Deep water removed from a replacement facility | What opportunities for water competency disappeared with it? |
Splash pad replacing the only neighborhood pool | Is water play being treated as equivalent to swimming access? |
No accessible route to desirable deck areas | Is accessibility technically provided but socially segregated? |
Pool lift positioned away from other entry points | Does the accessible entry make someone enter separately from everyone else? |
Accessible seating isolated from the rest of the seating area | Can disabled patrons participate socially as well as physically? |
No family/private changing options | Which bodies and families did the changing-room design assume? |
Extremely limited hours for teenagers | Are we designing youth out of the facility because their presence is considered inconvenient? |
Rules against sitting or gathering in certain areas without a clear safety basis | Which forms of public use are we trying to prevent? |
Entry system requiring smartphone access | Who does the technological design exclude? |
No drinking water or shade outside | Can someone stay without spending money? |
Removing diving boards or deeper water without replacing skill-development opportunities | What aquatic experiences become unavailable? |
One thing hostile-design scholarship teaches us is that exclusion can become embedded in ordinary objects. Rosenberger's Callous Objects examines how things as mundane as benches, fences, garbage cans, and signs can participate in larger systems of exclusion. (University of Minnesota Press)
That should make aquatic professionals curious about our ordinary objects too.
The chair.
The gate.
The pool lift.
The wristband system.
The fence.
The changing stall.
The shade structure.
The admission window.
None of those objects is automatically oppressive. But none of them is socially neutral either.
Seating Is a Surprisingly Good Place to Start
Parks discussions about hostile architecture frequently focus on seating because benches reveal how much design can quietly dictate behavior. Aquatic facilities should look at seating for the same reason.
Do we have benches only where people are expected to watch children?
Can teenagers sit together without being treated as though they are loitering?
Can someone who uses a mobility device sit with their family rather than beside an “accessible” space separated from everyone else?
Can grandparents remain comfortably at the pool while children swim?
Is there shade?
Can someone rest while moving from the parking lot to the facility?
Does every comfortable place to sit require paying admission?
These are small design questions until you are the person who needs the bench.
A Simple “Who Can Stay Here?” Audit
Look At | Ask |
Seating quantity | Is there enough for people who cannot stand for long periods? |
Seating design | Who cannot comfortably use these seats? |
Shade | Can patrons safely remain outside for extended periods? |
Location | Are accessible seats integrated with other seating? |
Cost | Is there somewhere to exist without making a purchase? |
Youth use | Are teenagers allowed to gather anywhere? |
Caregiver use | Can someone comfortably supervise without standing for hours? |
Routes | Are resting places available between major destinations? |
One of the uncomfortable truths about hostile architecture is that a design aimed at one supposedly “undesirable” behavior frequently makes the environment worse for many other people too. Aquatic design can do the same.
We Should Talk About Teenagers
Youth are another group frequently targeted by defensive public-space design.
Public recreation organizations say we want teenagers engaged in healthy activities, connected to their community, and spending time in parks and recreation spaces. Then we sometimes design those spaces so that teenagers are welcome only when they are registered for a program, playing an organized sport, working a shift, or moving through quickly. That contradiction deserves attention in aquatics.
Where can a teenager simply exist at your facility?
Can they sit with friends after swimming?
Can they use the pool independently?
Are there inexpensive drop-in opportunities?
Have rules been created specifically because groups of teenagers make adults uncomfortable?
Are behaviors that would be ignored from a group of younger children interpreted as threatening when teenagers do them?
A facility can technically be open to youth while its architecture and operations communicate that teenagers are tolerated only under supervision.
That feels very close to the conversations happening around hostile public-space design.
Accessibility Can Become Segregated Through Design
There is also an important disability angle. A facility can technically comply with accessibility requirements while still designing an experience that separates disabled patrons from everyone else.
Maybe the pool lift is around a corner from the main entrance.
Maybe wheelchair seating exists, but only at the end of the deck.
Maybe the accessible changing room is treated like a storage closet.
Maybe an accessible route requires someone to travel a much longer path.
Maybe every social space contains high-top tables.
Maybe there is no shaded seating that accommodates mobility devices.
These decisions may not be intentionally hostile. But they can communicate something similar: You may use this space, but not in quite the same way everyone else does.
That distinction between technical access and social inclusion is exactly why design justice matters.
There Is Also Such a Thing as Policy Doing the Work of Architecture
Hostile design is often physical, but aquatic exclusion can also be produced through the interaction of physical space and rules. For example, imagine a public pool with very little seating. Then add a policy prohibiting people from sitting on the edge of certain landscaped areas. The architecture and policy work together to determine who can comfortably remain.
Or consider a pool surrounded by a large public park but accessible only through paid admission, with no free water feature, no cooling space, and no shaded gathering area nearby. The design of the recreational complex helps decide which residents can access relief from extreme heat.
This is why the hostile-design conversation is bigger than spikes and benches. James Petty's research on hostile architecture describes environmental control that can become less visible precisely because it is embedded in ordinary, socially acceptable design. (AustLII)
Aquatic professionals should probably be asking where our own control systems have become invisible to us.
But Safety Is Real
Aquatics has one complication that parks and plazas do not always share to the same degree: water can kill people. Fences can prevent unsupervised access to swimming pools. Controlled entrances can support emergency operations. Sight lines matter. Deck furniture cannot block lifeguard surveillance. Certain areas genuinely need to remain clear. Capacity limits matter. Equipment placement matters. Not every restrictive design feature is exclusionary.
Sometimes the answer to “Why is this fence here?” is simply “because an unsupervised child getting into the pool could drown.” That is a legitimate safety objective. But “safety” should not become the end of every conversation. We can identify the function that must be preserved and still ask whether the chosen design creates unnecessary exclusion.
Could the gate be accessible?
Could seating be moved without compromising sight lines?
Could shade be added?
Could teenagers have somewhere appropriate to gather?
Could the accessible route be integrated with the route everyone else uses?
Could a neighborhood retain some form of swimming instruction even if the old pool truly cannot be rebuilt?
The equity question is not safety or inclusion. It is whether we have explored designs that can accomplish both.
Ask Who Was in the Room
Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice offers perhaps the most important question for this entire conversation: who participates in design decisions?
Design justice asks us to examine how risks, harms, and benefits are distributed and to value community knowledge in the design process rather than assuming professional designers, administrators, and funders automatically know what a community needs. (Design Justice)
Before replacing a neighborhood pool with a splash pad, did anyone ask residents what they would lose?
Before removing benches because of complaints about teenagers, were teenagers part of the conversation?
Before designing an accessible pool entry, did disabled swimmers participate?
Before deciding that the community “doesn't use the pool,” did anyone ask why?
Before designing changing rooms, did anyone talk with the families and patrons who will actually use them?
The design meeting itself can be an equity intervention.
Questions I Want Aquatic Professionals to Start Asking
I do not think the field needs a checklist declaring which aquatic features are officially hostile. I think we need better questions.
When evaluating an existing facility, renovation, new construction project, or pool replacement, I would start with questions like these:
Who can comfortably use this space?
Who can comfortably stay in this space?
Who has somewhere to sit, rest, gather, cool off, or wait?
Does someone need money to meaningfully participate?
Which behaviors has the design intentionally made difficult?
Which people are most likely to engage in those behaviors?
Are we addressing an actual safety problem or discomfort with a particular group?
If we removed something, what opportunity disappeared with it?
If a splash pad replaced a pool, what swimming opportunities were lost?
Can someone develop meaningful water competency here?
Are disabled patrons integrated into the same social spaces as everyone else?
Where can teenagers exist without buying something or joining a program?
Can older adults comfortably remain while grandchildren participate?
Are there places to recover from heat and sun?
Can someone navigate the facility without a smartphone?
Does every entrance, rule, fence, bench, gate, and pathway serve a function we can explain?
Who participated in making these decisions?
Who was not in the room?
Those questions will not always produce a simple answer. That is okay.
Maybe the Point Is to Notice the Question
Hostile architecture is powerful as a concept because it makes us notice that design governs behavior. Once you notice the divider in the bench, you cannot completely unsee what it is doing. I wonder what happens if aquatic professionals begin looking at our environments with that same curiosity.
Maybe we notice a splash pad serving a neighborhood that once had a swimming pool and ask what changed.
Maybe we notice that the only comfortable shaded seats are inside a paid facility.
Maybe we realize our accessible entrance technically works but routes disabled patrons away from everyone else.
Maybe we discover that teenagers have been systematically designed out of every place they might naturally gather.
Maybe we realize that a facility we describe as “open to everyone” actually requires money, transportation, technology, physical stamina, English fluency, and familiarity with recreation systems before someone can realistically use it.
None of those observations automatically proves the existence of hostile aquatic architecture. But they may tell us that architecture, policy, funding, and public recreation are doing more equity work than we have acknowledged.
So, Does Aquatic Hostile Architecture Exist?
I think the answer is worth leaving partially open. Traditional hostile architecture involves deliberate design choices that discourage particular people or behaviors from occupying public space. There are undoubtedly examples in parks and recreation environments that fit that definition directly.
Aquatic environments introduce a broader and perhaps even more interesting question: Can public aquatic design function as exclusionary infrastructure even when nobody explicitly intended to exclude?
Can we design water recreation that allows children to get wet but not learn to swim?
Can we technically provide accessible entry while socially separating disabled patrons?
Can we remove seating to solve “loitering” and make the facility harder for grandparents and disabled people to use?
Can we repeatedly choose the lower-cost aquatic amenity for lower-income neighborhoods and eventually create different levels of aquatic opportunity based on ZIP code?
Can we call a space public while designing it so people are welcome only when they behave, move, spend, and participate in the ways we expected?
I do not think aquatic professionals need to have all the answers yet. But I think we should start asking the questions. Because every facility communicates something through its design. The interesting question is who hears “you belong here” and who hears something else.
Resources and Further Reading
Robert Rosenberger's Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless is a concise introduction to how everyday objects and public-space design can participate in exclusion. His later scholarship on hostile design explores the concept more broadly and argues for additional research into how these designs affect behavior, attitudes, health, and public life. (University of Minnesota Press)
Sasha Costanza-Chock's Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need provides a broader framework for examining who participates in design, how design distributes benefits and burdens, and how marginalized communities can be centered rather than treated merely as end users. (Design Justice)
Jeff Wiltse's Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America is essential for bringing these questions directly into aquatics. Wiltse demonstrates that municipal pool location, pricing, segregation, desegregation, privatization, and public investment have always shaped who could participate in swimming and public aquatic life. (OUP Academic)
James Petty's work on hostile architecture and urban securitization is useful for thinking about the ways behavioral control can become embedded in ordinary public-space design, while contemporary hostile-design scholarship by Rosenberger and others continues to expand the concept beyond its most obvious examples. (Crime Justice Journal)
And for aquatic professionals specifically, I would keep the CDC's splash-pad guidance nearby when discussing splash pads versus pools. Splash pads can provide important, lower-drowning-risk water play because they are generally designed without standing water, but that same defining characteristic is why they should not automatically be treated as a substitute for infrastructure where people can develop swimming competency. (CDC)
