Atmospheres of Rejection: How Dark Design Rejects homeless in the city

You are looking for a place to sleep. You have no job, no money, and not place to stay. The night is closing in, and the city is changing its face from day to night. What will you do? Where will you go? This is the situation for millions of homeless people ‘sleeping rough’ in cities every night all over the world. For those of us not in this situation it is hard (if at all noticeable) to understand how this must feel. This paper explores in more depth how the rejection of homeless people in urban spaces is an interplay between public space design and human bodies. The framework of ‘dark design’ (Jensen 2019) is utilized as a background to the discussion of how social exclusion by design (e.g. spikes, leaning benches, inserts of metal frame etc.) is materializing, and how this is felt by ‘unruly mobile subjects’ such as homeless people. The paper connects existing research into social exclusion by design (Jensen 2019, Rosenberger 2017) with the notions of ambience and atmosphere (Böhme 2005). This is done to explore how the material exclusion of homeless people through dark design is enrolled into an ‘atmosphere of rejection’. The paper crosses explorations into hostile architecture and dark design with insights from the field of atmosphere, post-phenomenology and pragmatism.