Hostile architecture is nothing new for UC San Diego’s campus. From anti-homeless dividers on benches to deter sleeping (provide image), to high-security trash cans placed all over campus (provide image) to eliminate dumpster diving, the university’s distinct choices echo throughout the eight colleges. If you are a UCSD student, chances are you interact with hostile architecture daily without as much as a second thought.
Admittedly, I used to be a student interacting with these structures on campus without considering that their design might have another purpose. That was until I began taking classes in my Communications major that discussed how purposeful organization of space can alter your experience of that environment.
When this concept was first brought up in one of my classes, we were asked to sit with a space for a prolonged period and write about what factors contribute to its design, outside of its physicality.
Immediately, I thought of the new hammock poles next to Price Center, where the 2024 encampment for solidarity with Gaza once stood. The school was suspiciously quick to put up these poles following the protest and arrest of students that quarter, exactly where the tents had been.
Now, students lounging in the sun-soaked hammocks can remain blissfully unaware of the sixty student protestors arrested under the decision of our current chancellor, Pradeep Khosla. New and prospective students alike have no way of knowing about the five-day-long encampment that once took place at the heart of our campus.
This type of architecture is so effective because it operates under the guise of alternate usage. While these hammocks may seem like they benefit the student body at first glance, they were erected to silence student voices. To take down and forcefully erase what once was a community of activism at the center of campus seems completely counterintuitive to the student body.
What I think more students could benefit from remembering as they interact with structures on campus is that they reflect the desires of the university. They are less for the betterment of students and more for the ‘correct’ social organization of students as the university sees fit.
The irony of this silence dawns on me every time I see a group of touring students or university-hosted events like Triton Day, meant to showcase the very best of the school to potential students.
Similarly, this peculiarity surrounding the installation of the hammock poles seems to be echoed in sentiment among all levels of the student body.
The Triton spoke to a student protester who was arrested during the encampment and had this to say when asked for comment on the new hammocks,
“More than anything, I find it amusing that the school installed hammocks over the ground where the encampment was; it’s a remarkable display of spite, camouflaged as a gleaming new amenity that seemingly nobody found previously necessary. It only goes to show what we’ve known all along: the administration’s dismantling of the encampment was never about safety, or obstruction, or the land itself—it was about control and repression. What’s ironic is that, however innocuous the hammocks appear, we all know why they’re there. We know the values and the voices the hammocks are meant to suppress. So I guess what I’d really like to do is thank the administration for erecting such an enduring monument to their own miserable fear—the fear of their own students’ power.”
The student preferred to stay anonymous due to the ongoing legal procedures surrounding the arrests.
The Triton also spoke to a Ph.D. candidate in the social sciences who called upon ideas regarding the power dynamics of space, saying,
“It was the perfect space to put the encampment and could have, in the future, also served for other kinds of activity. But the point is to close that activity out and dictate the narrative … that the university wants to input. They are just commanding what is better for students… It is like a linear relationship to a colonial ideology whose residue underpins the university… It obscures your capacity to share that history with people because that space is so full of hammocks…You have to do more work on your imagination of the space… It’s harder to talk about the history of a space that has been built upon… Putting hammocks there is so explicitly part of a total erasure of that history… These aren’t just these innocent objects and spatial arrangements, they are a narrative and a discourse … and anything that is a threat to their narrative just needs to be removed.”
The state exerting its power and influence over a space once meant to protest colonial power in the Middle East sends a very clear message to students on campus.
If the administration were truly interested in preserving students’ wishes, they would erect something at the site as a reminder of the sense of community built at the center of campus during the encampment and the solidarity shown for those in Gaza. Ideally, it would echo the cause for divestment that the students were aiming to achieve and the action taken against them because of it.
Alessandra Breall is Editor of Arts and Culture for The Triton.