Attending the relatively new premises of a government department recently, I was struck by the lack of customer seating at the service counters, which were low enough to be used comfortably only when seated. While staff sat on their side of the low counter, walled in behind glass partitions, users had not simply to stand but to bend over to address staff, pass documentation through the partition and write on their forms.

Taking my place in the queue, I watched as, one by one, people called to the counters bent over - some hovering uncertainly, others crouching down - to complete their transactions until it was my turn to do the same. I do not know, but I presume, that the purpose of this design was to ensure that all the counters were accessible to wheelchair users. Yet I was angry at the inhospitality of these facilities which were, at the very least, physically awkward to use and also potential sources of backache for a good number of users.

Of course, it is valuable for those of us who are used to having public and social spaces designed around our majority non-wheelchair use to experience the physical difficulty and alienation encountered in infrastructure not designed for our needs. It gives us experience of an environment that is hostile to our particular presence.

When we think of hostility we probably first think of overt aggression such as war, actual fighting or angry words and raised voices. But it is possible for physical space, cultural mores, accepted patterns of behaviour and established ways of thinking to be hostile environments, even if there is no explicit intention for them to be so. Frequently such environments belong to the status quo, the majority, certainly those with power. And crucially, they remain, for the most part, unexamined. While we recognise the hostility of a group of local youths chasing members of the visiting Indian cricket team through the streets of Belfast as happened earlier this month, it is not so easy to recognise the potential hostility in our own ways of thinking and systems that we take for granted. Take, for example, the hostility in church institutions that cannot accommodate their female ministers working part-time when they have young children. Such lack of accommodation is profoundly hostile to women's physical and social embodiment as those who bear and care for children.

Hostile environments do not foster growth and human flourishing. They hinder, perpetuate division and are sources of human diminishment. Our engagement in the public square is about, at least in part, helping to make hostile spaces into hospitable places for the purpose of human thriving. If we feel overwhelmed by or inadequate to the task of tackling the more obvious 'overt' hostilities in our society we may be able to give attention to unexamined hostile environments, of which we are a part, seeking to make them hospitable to others in all their diversity or difference to ourselves.

Fran Porter

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Date for your diary:
4th November, 2006 - Centre for Contemporary Christianity Annual Conference
From here to eternity - Christian Spirituality for a changing world
Guest Speaker: Dr Marva Dawn
Armagh City Hotel