According to Unicef there are an estimated 750,000 people living on the street in the United States and a further 3,000,000 in Europe Tackling the issue of how to address urban homelessness has been a constant thorn in the side of the design and construction industry. There should be a basic rule – if you cannot design a basic shelter, you cannot call yourself an architect. Earlier this year the website Designboom tried to address this issues by hosting the ‘shelter in a cart’ competition as their 2006 Social Awareness Award. The response was incredible – over 4246 designers from 95 countries participated.
Prior to Architecture for Humanity I had spent my architectural education and graduate thesis focused on developing sustainable and transitional housing for homeless populations in New York City. More recently we released the book Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, which has a chapter on responses to homelessness – mainly in the United States. Therefore I was asked to be apart of final jury for the competition and was presented with a shortlist of 115 entries.
The brief set out was fairly controversial given the fact that the criteria was to develop a ‘cart’ system to support those who chose to stay on the streets, rather than the housing shelter approach. During the review the one thing that worried me was that many entries ignored two basic needs – protection of ones valuables and a self-sustaining economic engine.
By the end of the jury process I felt there was a sole entry that tackled these issues, the poorly named and under budgeted ‘a street car named survivor’. This entry, designed by Ing-Tse Chen, looked at a variety of potential way to generate income while still having safe and lockable storage while someone slept. The concept is based on the traditional Chinese carts, where the designer is from. The tricycle can transform the unit from a taxi to a movable store.
Other Self Built Structures
Since 1987 a team of renegade architects and builders, known as the Mad Housers, have been building small shelters for the homeless. More than 100 48 sq. ft. huts began to appear after the group negotiated with city officials to look the other way, unless a property owner complained or the residents were disruptive to the neighborhood. Shelters appeared in California, Illinois and Wisconsin throughout the 90’s but after many were dismantled the group disbanded. Fast forward a few years and a new group of Mad Housers reemerged in Georgia. This time they worked within homeless settlements and developed designs that blended in with the environment. Some homes have now been up for 6 years.
On the other side of the globe Kyohei Sakaguchi has been documenting homes built by the homeless in Tokyo, Japan. During his research there was an open source nature in sharing ideas and concepts, many that included sustainable technologies (see main image above). Homes included solar energy, lighting, cooking equipment, television or even computers, all have been produced with little or no money. Currently you can see a ‘zero yen’ house at the Vancouver Art Gallery. More images and information can be found via treehugger and Inhabitat. For more images of homelessness in Japan check out Nurri Kim's related photography Tokyo Blues.
The competition and these initiatives are not the the answer to issues of homelessness but they force the design community to begin to ask serious questions. What is the role of the designer? Who is the designer? Should we support these communities? Is homelessness a solvable issue?
