This lecture is part of the City of Rome programme, an intensive eight-week residential course coordinated by Dr. Christopher Stephen Siwicki, designed for postgraduates from selected British partner universities. The programme is aimed at students at the Master’s or early Doctoral level studying classical archaeology, art history, ancient history, and the transformation of antiquity in the Middle Ages and modern period.

Hostile design: Reassessing Roman architecture and urbanism

Hostile design, or hostile architecture, describes objects of public, semi-public and semi-private spaces that combine social control and interaction design to discourage or prevent usages typical to targeted populations, usually without the authorities’ explicit presence. Recognising that all design processes are, in one way or another, ideological, and that, by their very nature, imposing spaces and monuments are simultaneously enticing to some and hostile to others, this paper draws on contemporary urban criticism and policy to explore degrees and types of less perceptible hostilities embodied in the public architecture of Rome in the late Republic and early Empire. In doing so, it aims to reveal and decode power structures beyond pure surveillance, which might make us rethink traditional views on Roman urbanism.

Penelope J. E. Davies is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Hedda Andersson Professor at Lund University. She is author of Death and the Emperor (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and articles and essays in scholarly publications, and her co-edited Cambridge Urban History of Europe, Volume One: Antiquity will be published in 2025 (Cambridge University Press). Her research book project explores the political lives of Roman buildings.

See the full programme here.