Public Privacy: Legitimising Place for the Homeless in Contemporary Urbanism

Abstract

Many people in Auckland experience homelessness daily. The centrality of the private home to contemporary culture, the impact of neo-liberalism and its disregard for the weak, and inadequate public services, deny the homeless not only social status, but also the experience of citizenship and the ability to make personal choices. Furthermore, increased privatisation of the city, homeless-targeted legislation and the emergence of “antihomeless” architectures, exclude such individuals from prime urban spaces, to which, as citizens, they are entitled. These contemporary conditions limit the material existence of the homeless by preventing them from gaining access to fundamental options. The expanding functionality of the home as well as the physical absence and social disapproval of body-related public services prevents the homeless from adequately maintaining their physical condition. As a society, we cannot continue to accept these circumstances. Therefore, in counteracting this culture of exclusion, this thesis proposes architecture as a medium to facilitate integration of government provided public services that assist fundamental needs of the homeless. This architecture seeks to strengthen the homeless’ material, social and spatial existence. In designing spaces primarily dedicated to a disrespected demographic, the physical architecture itself risks social rejection. This outcome threatens to demoralise the targeted homeless occupant. Through design research, using predominantly the medium of analogue modelling, this thesis develops two distinct approaches that promote architecture as a tool to legitimately integrate “disapproved” programmes and occupants into the city. The first approach, named the Cryptic, accepts public rejection as an inevitable view of homelessness. Through techniques of visual and physical imitation of existing built environments, the project seeks to introduce such programmes into Auckland in a way that evades destructive public rejection. Alternatively, the second approach, named the Service Station, challenges social rejection. Through an unapologetic physical vocabulary, architecture is used as a tool to secure social integration of both programme and occupant. By legitimising – in these cases either visually or socially – the presence of such services in public, the architecture protects the dignity of the vulnerable homeless. Both approaches will not solve homelessness in Auckland, but they might help to provide some temporary relief. This design investigation suggests that architecture can acquire a role beyond a means of providing spatial and aesthetic pleasure. Instead of merely producing space for programmes and occupants to be contained, the two design projects investigate ways in which architecture can be used as a device to sculpt and determine preferred social conditions that arise as a result of the physical presence of artefacts.