Urban Environment: Homelessness and The Right to The City A morphological analysis

MA IN URBAN DESIGN URBAN DESIGN THEORY ii Urban Environment: Homelessness and The Right to The City

A morphological analysis

JEssica Franco BOhmer 17032084

summary 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.0 2.1 2.2

2.3 3.0 3.1 3.2 4.

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Introduction

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why this theme?

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the rights to the city “The right to the city is, therefore far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities are, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.�

(HARVEY,2008, P.01) According to Harvey the right to the city belongs to all general individuals and should not be neglected by anyone. By all means that even those who are in homelessness situation also have the right to the city, should them not be a part of the creation of our cities? Should not them be part of the process of decisions made for the city? As Harvey also clarifies (HARVEY,2008, P.08), quality of urban life has become a commodity that only people with a lot of money can afford and those with none have to live without any quality.

Furthermore, the cities have divided into wealthy neighbourhoods that provide all services while the rest of it becomes areas of illegal settlements or with lower quality of life where people have only the necessary if so and fight for their survival in a daily basis.

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morphological layers approach As urban designers we learn to study the morphological layers of the city and how can we improve people’s lives by changing and adapting them to the uses of the public realm.

This work will use the morphological layers as an approach to the analysis of the urban environment and what solutions can be generated to improve the issue of homelessness exclusion.

These solutions can be on: 1. Physical form: can the urban physical form be changed and adapted to include the presence of homeless people?

2. Social aspects: what can the society as a general can do to embrace the existence of this population?

3. Economic forces: what can the government do for those that live in the streets?

4. Historic forces: can we do something now to permanently change this situation in a long-term context?

5. Perceptual components or focuses on specific aspects of this form: what components – temporary or permanent – can we improve so the lives of those people become easier.

This approach is a way urban designers can study the environment and analyse it’s contemporary issues as well as generate future solutions, always recalling that physical changes can generate social changes and that social changes can make big impacts on the built environment.

phisical form

Landform

toppings

Public space network

plots

buildings components Plots

buildings

components

Public space network Landform

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social process 6

porto alegre | brazil Overall situation

2007 1,409,351 1.203

82% 15% 3% 44.6% 55.4% 29.3% 18.4% 14.1% 5.6%

2016 1,484,491

2.115

85.7% 13.8% 38.6% 61.4% 25.2% 45.7% 29.2% 9.9%

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porto alegre | policies Inefficient Policies

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porto alegre |initiatives Good initiatives

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brazil| extreme positions Extreme positionofsociety

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uk| oxford general data Oxford’sestimates

2011 150,200 18

2016 161,300 47

“The problem of homelessness is deeply emblematic of the sort of society Britain has become. What other social phenomena could better epitomize the end of modernity than our seeming inability to adequately respond to the most basic needs—shelter, warmth, food—of substantial numbers of our ‘citizens’?”

(BURROWS, 1997, P.02)

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oxford| Initiatives Goodinitiatives

Also, a number of other Shelters help these people during the day and night as well as recovering and engaging back into society. The Porch organisation was created in 1986 by St All Saints of the Poor Convent to provide food for the homeless population of Oxford and nowadays provides daily support not just for food but activities as art creation, counselling and therapy, etc. “Our mission is to help, in a totally non-discriminatory way, homeless, recently re-housed homeless or vulnerably housed people.

We encourage our service users (our members) to tackle the issues that prevent them from moving forward towards a more positive lifestyle. Our focus is on support and nurture, along with the challenge.

We concentrate on housing, health, wellbeing, education, and employment. We provide healthy food, practical help, companionship, learning skills, work-related skills and opportunities for development.�

(THE PORCH website)

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uk| extreme positions Extremepositionsofsociety Not only good attitudes towards the homeless population can be found in the UK in general. They are still in danger in the streets and suffer from being ignored and indivisible for the rest of population. Furthermore, they are not only ignored, sometimes, they are also expelled from places in a “subtle” way of saying: you do not belong in this space.

There are several cases in the United Kingdom where anti-homeless spikes were built to forbid them to sleep in certain public spaces. These “acts” started to be raised in parts of England where the neighbourhoods were not pleased by the sight of these homeless people wandering around the same place they conduct their daily lives.

There are still activists that- as the London’s Group Space, Not Spikes – are still willing to fight for those who have no home against this newly created “defensive architecture” that is transforming the public spaces in weapons against homelessness.

“Homelessness in Britain is not a recent phenomenon. There has always been a substantial minority of people who, for a variety of reasons, have been unable to provide or retain housing for themselves or their families. The patterns of causes have changed over time, but poverty has persisted as a key factor.”

(BURROWS, 1997, p.XI)

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analysis| general Oncontemporaryhomelessness Homeless individuals are treated as invisible beings and most of the general population simply pretend they do not see them or avoid eye contact with them. We may cross them congregating from site to site between parks, bus and train stations, particular streets where they may make less effort of concealing themselves from the public.

Most homeless people cannot be found in the streets, they rather remain out of view so it is hard to give them a precise number. They are mostly a very heterogeneous group of people that fall into that situation for different reasons and are, nonetheless, the majority of them, trying to recover from it.

The meaning of the word “homelessness� in the Oxford dictionaries is the state of having no home. Seems like this state has become permanent more and more every day, not just a temporary state during people’s lives. Today it has become harder to come out the no home situation when people are seen as invisible and not worthy of new chances.

According to Christopher Jencks (JENCKS, 1994), there is a distinction between those people that can be considered in short-term or long-term homelessness situation and they have different characteristics between them. These differences are in the attributes that led them to that situation and might only increase their chances of going back to society and conventional housing.

Reasons might be weak family ties, drug addiction, mental illness, alcoholism or limited job skills, which may only get worse with time if they do not seek help at an early moment.

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conclusion The aim of this report is to take a brief look at some of the features of homelessness, as they have been only evolved over the last decades and has hit a limit within the contemporary period.

After analysing the data of two completely different cultures and spaces we realize that all that includes or excludes the homeless into the city are deposited in the topping layers – the street furniture, the pavements, the spaces itself. However, it is clear that the urban environment has a lot more capability of including those people in other morphological layers that also dispose of empty and not used spaces.

Furthermore, there is no final solution to the increasing problem, there are temporary solutions and long-term solutions that must be applied as soon as possible so they can positively affect this part of society sooner rather than later.

The roots of problems that generate homelessness are already spread widely and very deeply into the social and physical fabric of cities, however, its solutions may be more common than we imagined and more applicable than expected.

As a follow up on this work the solutions here spoken will be forwardly explored as the final dissertation of the Masters in Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University.

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references Literature:

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figures list figures:

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figures list

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