April 30, 2024 | UVicSpace
This month’s top visited article on UVic’s institutional repository (UVicSpace) was a 2021 masters’ thesis titled An uncomfortable city: a community-based investigation of hostile architecture by Jessica Annan. The author published their thesis as a part of their of a masters degree in Sociology at the University of Victoria. Dr. William Carroll was her supervisor on the project.
Annan’s thesis dove into the impacts of hostile architecture in Calgary, and the role that it plays in the malice against people who are experiencing homelessness. In the thesis, Annan also asked the question: “How do people with lived experience of homelessness understand hostile architecture?”
While the thesis was originally published in 2021, it is gaining traction now more than ever, with about 486 visits to the thesis in April alone. The reach of the thesis has been worldwide, with readers spanning from Australia to Zambia. However the top three countries that hosted the most visitors were:
- United States
- Canada
- United Kingdom
Interestingly, the city that hosted the most readers of the thesis was downtown Victoria, with 40 more views recorded than any other city.
In the concluding sentiments, Annan stated that “the full impacts of this research will most likely not be felt for quite some time, as hostile architecture represents one of the most taken-for-granted threats to the inclusiveness of urban spaces. The more covert a mechanism, the more effective it can be and the longer it may persist.” Perhaps this is indicative of why this work is continuing to increase relevance as time goes on.
To read Jessica Annan’s full thesis, we encourage you to check it out on UVicSpace. Or you may check out the other fascinating work that Dr. Carroll has supervised by searching for him in our “browse by supervisor“!
