The city tells us who is desirable or not. The city tells us who it wants to be used by. That’s the key message at the heart of Labbé’s book, which is part of a lineage of socialist urban thinking in the same vein as Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “right to the city”. L’architecture du mépris – which could best be translated as contemptuous architecture or the architecture of disregard – is a term for urban furniture like anti-homeless spikes, benches that are designed to dissuade lying on them and water jets installed at the entrance to city car parks to stop homeless people sleeping in them overnight. “The city is speaking to us, but we don’t notice,” Labbé tells us. Urban design is not innocent; a message is always being sent. The book invites us to notice what is around us, the small transformations of a street, a neighbourhood, an entire district, that can have major repercussions on its inhabitants. Labbé makes an argument for resisting this new language of hostility in architecture, and calls on citizens everywhere to reassert their right to public space.

Catherine Bennett