How it started

Work with the topic of homeless people in cities started in 2021 after discussions with homeless.ru project in Snt.Petersburg.

Homeless people are people who are living directly in our city, these are people, who not only live and interact with our city, they are in some sense KPI of our cities.

[Edgar, 2009] is the main resource for the available resources on homelessness.

New type of homelessness, homelesseness 2.0

There is a new type of homelessness currently emerging. People may become homeless when they are just not having their home, but they have multiple jobs.

The salary of such people may vary a lot - from being on support from the government money to being able to sustain yourself.

In Paris I was introduced to one homeless person, who was living under the bridge and every morning this person was going to work.

Interesting enough is that such person was able to live in both worlds: homeless and people, who have work place.

Some support provided to homeless people:
Emergency accommodation for roofless persons
Temporary accommodation for houseless persons
Non-residential services for homeless and formerly homeless persons
Psychological support

More information is coming soon. Shelters figure from the project on shelter construction.

Winter holidays time is the best to reflect on trees and to create new perspectives on cities in the future. Inspired from texts from urbanists and architects such as Arnheim ("Evolution of architectural form"), le Courbusier, Bauhaus creators, Aurelie ("Less is enough") and some others, here we give some main take-home messages about cities around the globe.

Rudolf Arnheim writes in his work on architecture of cities:"The Street as Figure In cities, buildings… are parts of rows,… fitting inseparably into 2-dimensional walls… of ‘urban canyons’ (streets)… The street ‘canyon’ is the realm of man’s amplified presence and is therefore perceived as figure… With the increased demands of the transportation system, streets have become more important than the arrangement of buildings in determining the layout of town".

Since architecture is a perfect example of visual language, there is quite some symbolism in all buildings and surroundings of environment. In the chapter "SYMBOLS THROUGH DYNAMICS" R.Arnheim writes: "In a well-designed building, there is a structural correspondence between visual properties and functional characteristics"

Hence one can think of architectural language as the mapping (non isomorphic) between the function and form.

Another known review on cities is called "Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961). In this book the author talks about one of the main process of changes and evolution of cities (not only specifically American ones) - about their evolution and what drives some of them become centers of culture and trading, and what makes some of them slowly to disappear.In Chapter 2: “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety.” the author writes: "Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities.

Max Weber sociologist on finite size effects in cities is asking general question: "Why some cities are small and sustainable while others are big and contain many non-connected ghettos?"
Read more from his research on city stratification and city sociology here.

New drawings and computer generated images are dedicated to the computer art project on city perception of reality.
How our brain perceives our reality in the city? Is perception of city always opposed to the perception of nature?
Can we trick our brain and make it more familiar and happy with some unpleasant environment?