A community of homeless people living in tents line a Skid Row street in Downtown Los Angeles Jeff Lewis/AP Images for AIDS Healthcare Foundation
In symposium this week, the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles convenes architects and scholars from around the globe for a week of discussions, performances, and panels on homelessness and housing precarity. Worlds of Homelessness (until 27 October) brings an international perspective to the citys ongoing homelessness crisis and aims to foster meaningful dialogue and cross-cultural exchanges on the global rise of housing insecurity, while interrogating how fields of design and architecture interact with homeless communities.
Events explore the linkage between homelessness, housing access more broadly, and related issues such as “the gap between rich and poor, participation, inequality, gentrification, race, [and] migration,” explains the Goethe Instituts Lien Heidenreich-Selme.
“All these issues are obviously connected,” she says. “We tried to bring together local and international artists, architects, scholars and others, to offer a platform to share ideas, thoughts, and to present their work and examine different ways of engagement.”
Dialogues scheduled throughout the week survey homelessness and housing access from vantage points around the globe and address specific projects implemented in cities such as Johannesburg and Medellin, and novel approaches to housing precarity like mixed housing, collective housing, and informal settlements. Each panel includes a speaker from Los Angeles, while others hail from locales including Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna.
The projects interdisciplinary approach focuses on bridging the gap between architects and city planners and the homeless communities they ostensibly serve.
“What was important to us was to speak not about homelessness, but also with people who have the lived experience,” says Heidenreich-Selme.
On Tuesday, the Muralist and rapper Crushow Herring aka ShowzArt, a prolific artist well known in the Skid Row neighborhood, joined UCLAs Ananya Roy, urban ethnographer Michele Lancione, and Barbara Schönig from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for the introductory discussion framing the project and weeks events, and brings a perspective from inside Skid Row.
The week also opened with a musical performance from the LA Playmakers and closes with the two-day 10th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists, hosted by the arts non-profit and performance group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which counts among the organizations partnering with the German cultural embassy. Founded by director-performer-activist John Malpede in 1985, the group works throughout the community to make Skid Row more livable, culturally rich and engages in activism.
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