Right to Shelter

The Los Angeles Times this week reported on a competition to create a portable homeless shelter:

"Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa took the honors, with a mobile shopping cart-like apparatus. The cart features bins to hold cans, bottles and other recyclables collected by day. It folds out to create a sleeping platform, topped by a canvas cover with zippers and windows."

The idea is to mass produce shopping-cart shelters for homeless people, and goes as far as to lobby cities to set aside vacant land for tent encampments with running water and special telephones.... Sound like something out of bad movie? Not surprising, since the creator of EDAR is a B-movie producer and philanthropist based in Los Angeles. In reality, however, these fold-up devices would do more harm than good to anyone involved in the process.

They have less storage room than a real shopping cart ( are much heavier and less mobile (key critique) than a tent, and cost ten times as much than a sturdy tent and duffel bag. The immobility issue would weigh heavy on the mind of anyone whose daily existence depends on motion- walking, shifting in and out of sight/participation, escaping threats, looking for items.

EDAR even expects the end-users of its product to call a toll-free number and update staff on the function and even location of their unit. While I don't believe this is an effort to relegate homeless people into permanent, docile, visible can collectors happily shuffling our streets as underclass by day, returning to their tent camps at night- it sure looks like that's what will be accomplished. While the full-scale implementation of the EDAR vision faces a host of legal issues (ordinances, privacy versus enforcement, NIMBYism), it faces one much more obvious one-- a $400 price tag.

A sturdy duffel bag and a dome tent would provide the "upgrade" in living conditions at a fraction of the cost, without the social and legal question marks of EDAR. Upgrading from a cardboard box doesn't need to be so complicated.

K. Drain

New Urbanism: Leading their people into the desert

The Economist this week writes about Mesa, a desert town in the Southwest US that plans to cleanse its faltering suburban identity through new development. With a new airport and a New Urbanist downtown, Mesa hopes to become an “aerotropolis,” built from nothing, surrounded by nothing and accessible primarily by plane.

Putting its faith in the power of repackaging, the city will dictate design but not use (a pillar of New Urbanism) in the new downtown that it is building from scratch next to existing suburban neighborhoods. The New Urbanist creed is that if you build a mix of uses, a utopian community will follow. In the mirage of the New Urbanism, culture and diversity, transit-oriented development, and environmental sustainability are always on the horizon but vanish as you crawl closer.

Pedestrian-friendly streets are a good start, but do not guarantee social cohesion by themselves. Past experiments with New Urbanism in Florida have been more de-facto enclaves than oases of inclusion. And how sustainable is a community that assumes that people will have to travel by airplane to reach their jobs and the next outpost of civilization?

To create this miraculous spring of growth and development, claims the Economist, the city “is looking both to the future and a long way into the past.” In this vision, air travel is the future, and New Urbanist design lends the charm and security of the past. But what past and what future are we talking about?

It is an imagined and exclusionary past in which people sat on their front porches and all got along happily. The New Urbanist version of the past forgets the bloody history of wresting land from Mexican ranchers and American Indians upon which the West was built.

New growth and construction have long been favored solutions to economic constraints in the US. As planned, New Mesa’s downtown expansion merely promises to be a new frontier for urban sprawl.

E. Mattiuzzi


Followup: read about the New Urbanism debate in the UK

"Finns doing their bit in the fight against climate change"

hostile urban environment

Today at the Powell Street BART (light rail) station in downtown San Francisco at 2:00 pm, I saw a man wearing a bright yellow vest reading "clean and safe downtown" pour an oversize Burger King cup of water onto a waist-height ledge by the station entrance. Walking past at 10:00 AM, I had noticed that the ledge was wet while the surrounding area was dry (ruling out rain or a morning hose-down of the sidewalk by a nearby business).

No, this was a periodic, targeted action designed to make the urban environment inhospitable for the homeless or other persons who might wish to sit or vend or beg at the transit entry-point to the city’s busiest shopping area, much of which is indoors and therefore subject to private security. His ‘official’ looking uniform suggested that this was an unofficial municipal policy in a city that is known for outlawing panhandling.

The man poured slowly and with purpose, careful to cover any possible dry space on this would-be seating area on Market Street, which has no nearby purpose-built street furniture for anyone who might wish to sit down. As in many cities, the luxury of sitting comfortably anywhere comes at the price of consumption. “Safety” and “cleanliness” are buzzwords for excluding bodies out of place through spiky pavement under windows, benches divided by arm rests, spinning bus-shelter seats, and this latest tactic.

E. Mattiuzzi

Exclusively Worn

Pipe cleaner dreams eased back
through the number of loops on the rise
steadily twined
round the digit that probes furthest into bodies that hum rather than click
gargantuan men
banned from smoking
still with burnt heads
ages later
peerless
white tied – chalked – roped and blown
raised in orange winds
hurtling plumes similar to those in which they once gave rise
when fibers were something exclusively worn

J.S

Postcard from Seattle

20 October 2008

Dear Contemporary Urbanist:

Landing in Seattle, I was first struck by the landscape of the Pacific Northwest: the fir trees, the coastline, the hills. Coming in closer to the urban landscape of downtown Seattle and its surrounding neighborhoods, I began to notice something about the freeway off-ramps, underpasses, and industrial buildings. A startling number of these otherwise mundane or grimy spaces were brought to life by urban murals, sculptures, and other artwork.

The bus stop and the freeway or bridge underpass is a part of a city that most people filter out of their everyday consciousness. These are the spaces that are only really noticed by people who do so out of necessity, not out of choice. Even the people who must pass through them are actively tuning out their surroundings, clutching a coffee mug and an iPod at the bus stop or zipping under bridges on bike paths.

Particularly in the North American context, we associate the freeway underpass with the homeless encampment and stigmatize the bus stop because of its use by people who are out of the mainstream of our car culture: the young, the elderly and the poor.

The bus stop and the underpass are necessarily transitory spaces filled with what Mary Douglas would call “matter out of place.” They are overlooked as the armpit of the city, permeated by smells of trash, body odor, and car fumes. In Seattle however, a public arts program has changed the sensory experience of many of these locations.

Seattle has been setting an example with its public art funding since 1973, when it passed a law to set aside one percent of the city’s public construction budget to fund commissions of murals, sculpture, and installation art. In the Fremont neighborhood, the giant concrete troll under the Aurora Bridge is big enough to clutch a Volkswagen bug in his hand. The piece was selected by a vote of the surrounding community and is a Seattle icon.

Elsewhere in the city, murals transform bus shelters and gray freeway underpasses. Installation art distracts the eye from disused lots and storefronts. In the Capitol Hill neighborhood, one such display features a mock furniture store that plays with the theme of fur in picture frames and other living room ephemera in the spirit of Banksy’s New York “pet shop” installation.

Seattle is a city, like New York or east London, with a healthy community of stencil, sticker, and graffiti artists who make the urban landscape just a little bit less drab. Both formal and informal street artwork are assets that can have the ability to make us take a second look at unlikely and otherwise unloved fragments of city life.

E. Mattiuzzi