***Call for Abstracts***

(With apologies for cross-posting)

 

We kindly invite for abstract submissions for a thematic panel session at the ‘Ecologies of Care’ 20^th AHRA International Conference in Portsmouth.

 

Session topic
Homeless Housing: Architectural Histories of Incarceration and Relief

Session organizers
Jeroen Stevens (KU Leuven) & Sabrina Puddu (University of Cambridge)

Situated Ecologies of Care
The 20^th AHRA International Conference
Architectural Humanity Research Association
Wed 25 Oct – Fri 27 Oct - Portsmouth School of Architecture
Session #116 (Paper Presentations)
Click to register and make a submission to this session – deadline 12th June

 

If the house is the quintessential locus where the production of the modern subject takes place through everydayness, then homelessness, together with poverty and idleness, are modern anomalies par excellence. Consequently, the lack of a conventional home, whether intentional or not, is criminalized as the origin of a spiral of disobedience and deviancy. Since the dawn of modern urbanity, the discomfort, to put it mildly, of our society towards homelessness has nurtured a sophisticated architectural repertoire deployed to confine unhoused people. This repertoire embraces an inherent conjunction of care and control – sometimes consciously allied, sometimes clashing in open tension as manifest in housing norms, standards, architectural style and spatial organization.

Wavering between the carceral and the domestic, the sedentarization of unhoused people paradoxically relies on their displacement in shelter accommodations where housing standards are suspended under the aegis of emergency and alleged temporariness. In hindsight, these architectural responses appear painfully consistent across time. Nonetheless, diverse ecologies of care and control have dealt with homelessness in myriad different ways. How, for instance, does New York’s current reinstatement of street sweeps and involuntary homeless detainment echo vagrancy laws once designed to rid the early industrial city of trespassers, vagabonds, and idling derelicts? How are contemporary homeless shelters or camps emulating historical almshouses or workhouses? And to what extent do alternative settlements such as Portland’s Dignity Village resonate with historical intentional dwelling communes for and by homeless people?

This panel convenes around canonical and exceptional histories of homeless relief and incarceration, and especially the entanglement of both. We invite interdisciplinary proposals merging architectural history with homeless studies, prison studies, and carceral geography. Papers can present case studies from architectural and urban histories and explicitly reflecting on the relation between the built environment vis-à-vis homelessness and unhoused subjects.

Please submit an abstract of max. 300 words and up to five keywords at the conference submission portal before June 12^th 2023. For more information, do not hesitate to take contact by e-mail: [log in to unmask].

 

With most kind regards,