Crews embedded about 150 brick blocks in a roughly 60-square-meter patch of pavement under a pedestrian bridge near JR Osaka Station over three days in July. Posts showing the blocks in neat rows spread quickly online, and many of them asked whether the work was "exclusion art" — hostile design meant to push homeless people out of public space.
Osaka city, which carried out the work, denied it. "Countering homelessness was not the only purpose," the city said, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. Internal city documents obtained by the newspaper describe a purpose that sits awkwardly with that explanation.
The Mainichi Shimbun reported that it obtained more than 100 pages of internal documents, including photographs, and that they record the aim of the construction work. The newspaper did not publish the wording of the documents in the portion of its report available.
A patch of bare ground beside a crossing
The site is on the east side of JR Osaka Station, which about 750,000 people use each day, near a pedestrian crossing. The city's construction bureau said the ground there had been a planting bed.
A pedestrian bridge overhead cut off the sunlight, the plants died several years ago and the soil was left exposed, according to the bureau. People were not expected to walk into the space, but bicycles and garbage began to be dumped there.
The city embedded the blocks from July 9 to 11. The construction bureau said the aim was to stop people from entering the space.
Millions of views, and a split
When images of the ordered rows appeared on social media, users wrote that people had been tripping there and that the arrangement looked dangerous, and asked what it was for. One post was viewed more than 26 million times.
Much of the reaction focused on the charge that the blocks were exclusion art, a term for spikes, studs and angled surfaces installed to keep people from sitting or sleeping in public places. Opinion divided sharply.
Osaka has faced the question before. The city's public explanation drew a line between managing a neglected strip of ground and targeting the people who used it. The documents the Mainichi Shimbun obtained record a purpose closer to the second.