Positions

Week 13

The boundaries between urban public and private spaces are being used by the homeless, who have attached their tents to the fences of parking lots, the rolling shutters of stores, or the exterior walls of buildings. These homeless people stay in these areas without a relatively stable and safe space. Meanwhile, this occupation of public space also affects the appearance of the city and the passage of pedestrians and vehicles. How can this situation be improved in many ways?

Parking lot edges are usually the main locations for homeless people, who are located above the dividing line and occupy part of the public walkway. How to use these boundary lines to provide shelter to the homeless while improving the overall visual effect of the street? Can parking lots be converted into spaces that can be used for public services?

Converting existing parking lots into green parking lots while also considering how to coexist with homeless shelters. How can natural resources be efficiently converted? Adding greenery and permeable pavement at the boundary can provide water for public restrooms after collecting and filtering rainwater. There is always plenty of sunshine in California, and we can consider installing solar panels in outdoor parking lots with huge open areas. Solar energy can serve a variety of purposes, not only for charging points in parking lots, but also for powering shelters along the street. When LADWP is responsible for municipal electricity consumption, it needs to consider the electricity consumption of streetlamps. Some streetlamps or signal lamps use solar energy. In the skid row area, the public lighting situation at night is not good, and the dark environment will provide more possibilities for crime. Effective and reasonable arrangement of solar streetlights can effectively improve the street environment, and the collected solar energy can also provide electricity for public toilets or public charging devices. If the LA government's funding on the homeless issue is used to provide solar energy facilities, it may be a measure to improve the city's public space and homeless living environment.

Greening Paking Lots

A Green Parking Lot includes Green Infrastructure (GI), incorporating elements found in natural areas into a parking lot area. GI is the living network that connects impervious areas to landscape areas, natural areas, and waterways. GI captures rainfall; cools buildings and pavement; and creates natural pathways for wildlife. GI includes Low Impact Development (LID) techniques, which mimic nature to capture and treat stormwater as close to the source as possible. When implemented, GI creates living green parking lots that capture, store, and infiltrate stormwater to treat it as a resource and improve the County environment.

Trees in parking lots are sometimes confined to small planting areas where they struggle to reach a mature size or live a long life. Through the use of Structural Soil, Structural Cell, or Suspended Sidewalk techniques, soil volumes and space for tree roots to grow uninhibited can be greatly increased. These techniques also allow for more water and air to reach the tree roots.

Types of permeable pavement

permeable concrete pavers pervious concrete

porous asphalt porous rubber

decomposed granite pathway boardwalk

This graphic provides an example of how several different techniques may be combined for Green Parking Lot implementation.

Solar Energy

The EcoBox by AccessPub in Rabat, Morocco. This contraption appeared to provide at least three public services: you could dispose of trash through two slots on either end of the dumpster, surf the Internet via its WiFi setup, or top up your cellphone’s battery by connecting to one of the electrical outlets (even if cybersecurity experts and common sense highly discourage plugging your electronics into random USB ports).

Homeless people have limited access to information, and many may not have cell phones or couldn't charge their phones. Using solar energy can provide them with convenient and cheap electricity. Covering parking lots with Solar Panels, providing Shade, and Generating Electricity to charge Electric cars. Installing solar panels in open parking lots might be one way to provide electricity to public utilities. It could provide more street lighting, public charging ports, or power for bathrooms.

Framlab’s proposal would see a repurposing of the unused gable walls of high-rise buildings all throughout the city (often present in vacant corner plots or on unused tracts of land) into foundations for honeycomb-shaped sleeping pod structures. There is already an abundance of these windowless walls throughout New York, and good use could be made of them to benefit the homeless population. A scaffold would be constructed outside

Honeycomb-Shaped Sleeping Pods for NYC Homeless

the walls so as to not infiltrate the buildings themselves. Afterwards, the prefabricated pods would be hung from the scaffolding. The pods would be accessed via a series of staircases built into the scaffolding, which would weave their way between the wall and the back of the pods. The benefit of this system is that is can be assembled and disassembled with relative ease and moved to another location if necessary.

Windowless facades provide vertical spaces, solve the difficulties caused by limited road area The space located in the gap of the building is a good choice, with the walls on both sides providing a good support structure for fixed the pod.

Tents that rely on roadside shops are often at risk of being cleared, portable and mobile are essential.

Roofs are also suitable for consideration

The possibility of parking strip being used

Street corner location will produce crowd gathering effect, how to combine with the reasonable use of public facilities.