Academic literature on the topic 'Homeless architecture'

While architecture, a physical built art form, markets itself as a public endeavor, access divides along societal and economical status. Urban planning of city layouts mimic and deep these divides, falling prey to the ideology that one must afford spaces, beauty, and comfort. Those who fall short of societal standards must be designed away as to not inconvenience the desired user. Washington DC does not even deem shelter a human right. The homeless, who population is higher there than anywhere else in the United States, are simply neglected. The Embed Projects aims to recognize their needs. Exploring the conditions and attributes that led them there, the every day struggles faced, the community centers focus on overall support through many facets. Breaking down hostile architecture, the failures of homeless architecture solutions typically offered, and the systemic design to keep individuals from escaping homelessness, and exploring the lifestyle sustainability offered through permanent housing. This thesis offers a city wide, communal plan to provide flexible, permanent housing to individuals suffering from homelessness and a full network of support for every homeless individual. It aims to address not only the housing but the societal measures that led to it, and difficulties of within this community.<br>Master of Architecture<br>Historically architecture was designed to be for everyone but never has been. Money and class have always played too large of a role. Housing, design, and the over network of cities should never be restricted. This thesis navigates the start of network throughout Washington DC that would help the overwhelming issue of homelessness there. Public housing would be offered in a variety of sizes and locations with the hope of a growth throughout the city. Embed provides not only housing but also a network to support them. It looks into the reasoning for individuals to fall into homelessness and who is most vulnerable, the issues faced by those who are suffering from it, and the roadblocks society has set up against escaping it. The design of the two community centers dives into these issues and roadblocks, attempting to offer possible solutions.

This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.<br>Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2019<br>Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.<br>Includes bibliographical references (pages 146-151).<br>In this thesis, a building is designed on a New York City-owned vacant lot in Harlem to serve homeless LGBTQ youth. The City of New York maintains the condition of vacancy scattered throughout the five boroughs where, The Department of Housing Preservation and Development owns over 1,300 empty lots. While these spaces may be viewed as real estate opportunities, approximately a quarter of them are undesirable for development due to their small, Old Law size (25' x 112'). Further, an examination of the history of these lots should resist a reductive response to simply build market-rate housing. The vacancies are the result of strategic disinvestment through redlining practices. Historically, this has disproportionately impacted low-wealth communities of color. Today, these urban voids maintain the memory of displacement and destruction among these communities. Undesirable to their families, thousands of LGBTQ youth find themselves living on the streets. While seven percent of youth identify as LGBTQ in New York City, this minority community makes up over forty percent of the homeless youth population. One response to this crisis by the queer community-specifically within house-ball subculture-is the creation of "houses" where chosen families are formed. In these social structures, "mothers" and "fathers" serve as guardians for their "children," taking care of them through the myriad challenges faced by youth who identify along the gender and sexuality spectra. This organization is paired with contemporary practices in youth homeless shelters to rethink supportive services and housing for homeless youth. Building Against Vacancy imagines an architecture that transforms undesirable lots into viable, vibrant spaces for non-dominant forms of culture, expression, and living.<br>by Joseph Michael Swerdlin.<br>M. Arch.<br>M.Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture

There are preconceived notions that human beings and built environments have a defined life-span. Both the homeless population and the abandoned infrastructure of cities are seen as existent until their place in society has been tapered, suspended or given up on completely. Once the individual or building reaches a point of societal condemnation it is neglected and eventually forgotten, slipped into the archives of non-existence. What once was an element of a functioning whole becomes a void that is commonly overlooked. Many forgotten people within the homeless population and buildings within abandoned infrastructure have an immense amount of potential energy that may be utilized to further their existence as a function of society. At a human level the homeless person flows through the social construct with little more acknowledgement than a shrug of the shoulder and a minor donation. In the built environment resources sit stagnant amongst constantly advancing infrastructure. In both circumstances the subject is left to exist as a non-participating part of a society that does not acknowledge their presence and lacks the mutual interaction that makes the vagrant or abandoned infrastructure an integral part of the social system. The Re-Institute program identifies contributing factors of social exclusion at both human and infrastructural levels. These factors will be counteracted by reversing the primary concepts of social exclusion into a catalyst to solve the issue. The mechanisms used to combat the problems of social exclusion will exist in a sociological, environmental and programmatic realm within the Re-Institute project. Through the architectural and programmatic development of the program, these mechanisms will re-institute neglected resources back into a constructive part of society.

Modern homelessness is one of the most pressing social and political problems of our time. Several hundred thousand people experience homelessness in the United States each year, and the U.S. Department of Housing, which attempts to count those people, has admitted that their statistics are conservative estimates at best. A recent archaeological study (Zimmerman et al 2010) examining material culture associated with homeless communities in Indianapolis has suggested that those who are considered chronically homeless have generally abandoned wage labor and are instead pursuing urban foraging as a subsistence strategy. In order to better understand the structures of homeless communities, I have expanded this archaeological and ethnographic form of inquiry and used it to present evidence of material culture and foraging patterns among the urban homeless near Tampa. I used participant mapping to obtain 20 individual maps that show each informant’s catchment area, and I performed surface survey of material culture found at camp sites in a four-square-mile area. I found that individuals tend to make homes wherever they are and that much of the material culture reflects what could realistically be expected in any house or apartment. I also found that individuals utilize many resources across the landscape to obtain food, water, clothing, and shelter but must simultaneously remain invisible. This shows that homeless individuals are economic outcasts who must survive outside of yet are still quite dependent on society. Ultimately, this research shows how anthropology can be used to advance a scientific understanding of a specific set of economic processes and how these affect people.