Temporary Urban Shelter

Temporary Urban Shelter

This tree house design from Recetas Urbanas speaks to the homeless problem I disscussed earlier. It is an installation from 2001 in Sevilla designed as temporary shelter for the urban guerrilla.

The modus operandi as quoted in their site:
- Occupation of a tree with provisional shelter.
- Resistance to urban politics.
- Light construction systems.
- Reversible colonization strategy.
- Dynamics of social adhesion.
- Lucid, but destabilizing, action.
- Instantaneous temporal sequence.


I like this architectural design approach to validating a transient lifestyle. I'm sure there are many urban planners, city counsellors, and bylaw enforcement types who would totally hate the idea -- it promotes chaos, lawlessness, and homelessness -- but the real reason I suspect it would freak out the type A personalities is because it doesn't fit into their control structure! And, I believe behaving in ways that may make these people freak out is okay because cultivating a degree of personal independence is a healthy thing for people to do.

"It is not necessary to justify what should be obvious concerning the inability of urban planning to define the development and growth of a city that finds itself incapable of action given the changes in political attitudes, which means an absolute submission to the demands of the market and ground speculation." Is the city really concerned about an individual's capacity to meet their basic shelter needs?

A profound design, like this urban shelter, is like an objectified how-to manual: How to enable the environmental nomad, urban guerrilla, social demonstrator, and modern gypsy. It embodies an easy step-by-step guide on how to empower people who want to live without excessive infrastructure; how to practice alternate lifestyle techniques; how to aquire an alternate lifestyle point-of-view.

And the funny thing is that revolutionary objects don't really tell you anything. They are just props that are really good at helping you write your own life manual. People innately want to learn and grow, to build their own adaptive repetoir, existential flexibility, and the capacity to self-sustain their humanity. However, whenever, wherever.

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