The Spectrum of Defensive Placemaking: Affordances and Perceptibility in Public Spaces of Leisure

Defensive architecture refers to strategic use of design elements to limit access and to modify behavior by changing the affordances of (public) spaces. This practice often disproportionately affects marginalized communities like underhoused individuals or youth subcultures by influencing their modes of participation in public life of cities. In this way, defensive architecture effectively shapes ingroups, outgroups, and the possible and permissible behaviors in spaces of leisure. This conceptual paper situates defensive architecture within the broader construct of placemaking in urban contexts and, using concrete examples, constructs a spectrum of perceptibility for defensive placemaking ranging from overt to covert. Such measures and urban inhabitants' subjective understandings of and interactions with them add a layer of fluidity to the differentiation between ingroups and outgroups. Building on this multilayered nature of defensive placemaking, the paper calls for a holistic approach in evaluating its role in leisure settings, and advocates for a paradigm shift from defensive to adaptive placemaking in which the design focus shifts from rigid design elements with high exclusionary potentials toward prioritizing multiple affordances that foster diverse uses and user groups. In this context, implications for practitioners and policymakers as well as future research directions for leisure scholars are introduced.