housing the unhoused | paris by natalia scoczylas
Paris for everyone: Enfants du Canal et PEROU Like a volcano rumbling at the heart of the forest, somewhere in the city there must be a place where the unknown emerges. The world is this incessant movement glimpsed through the holes in the shells of our capital cities, now ocean liners of the third age. — Philippe Vasset Paris is on a mission to change one of the most desired world’s capital in the most hospitable city in the world – Paris de l’Hospitalité. Since April 2014 the organisers have been accepting projects – which can be submitted by creators, artists, architects and constructors – that would address the needs of a broadly understood population of nomads in the inner city. There are 15,000 people who occupy Parisian streets for a variety of reasons, which shows the need to creae alternative solutions that would make use of hidden folds and public spaces, to provide them with comfortable, flexible shelters. The complexity of the project and the openness of its formula addresses the question of modern urban living and different forms of nomadism. This is anything but a new phenomenon, still nomad presence has been neglected and stigmatised by authorities whose interest, as the Paris de l’Hospitalité organisers believe, is to exile unwanted, irregular dwellers, rather than to seek ways of including them in the urban context and benefiting from their vibrant, alternative presence. It is not just the simple introduction of a system of innovative sleeping solutions for jobless wanderers – it is a search for possibilities that would be useful in times of inevitable social, human and cultural crisis such as we are facing at the moment.
Enfants du Canal temporary housing.
courtesy Perou-Paris de l’Hospitalite
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Ten projects will be chosen by a jury, half of which is made up of previously homeless people who benefit now from the project Enfants du Canal , an initiative that supplies 350 urban dwellers with temporary transition shelters in the city (above), allowing them to recover, to recollect a sense of stability, health and fitness and relieving them from the whole range of negative, aggravating experience that is part of living in the street. Enfants du Canal ’s militant approach and its disappointment with official politics lead to the use of buses as shelters that serve as daily mobile centres for those in need. The second partner in the project is PEROU ( Pôle d’Exploration des Resources Urbaines ), a group of artists, architects and researchers whose idea was to address the problem of ‘great urban precarity’ – a term that can be considered extremely relevant and visionary in terms of modern urban and housing policies which contribute to enormous scarcity of resources, such as affordable flats, which in combination with labour- related precariousness menaces young generations. PEROU’ s mission is to reformulate the whole conception and use of common urban space – again, the word common instead of widely used public is a conscious choice, imposing the correct attitude towards what belongs to all and yet by being called public is alienated from any sense of belonging, not to mention claim for use. PEROU insists on the recreation of the city starting from the margins.
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