Housing First! Fighting Homelessness
A three-day studio about Housing First and how it can radically transform homelessness policy around the world. On the roots, challenges, and possibilities of this strategy, including its implications for architecture and urbanism. Taking place on Fri 20 Nov, Fri 27 Nov + Fri 4 Dec.
The regular ticket price for this 3-day studio is 150 Euro. To make our courses accessible across different economic realities, we offer a limited number of solidarity tickets at a reduced price of 75 Euro for those who would otherwise not be able to participate. We kindly ask that you choose a solidarity ticket only if you genuinely cannot afford the regular ticket price. If neither of these prices reflects your financial situation, please write to us. We will do our best to find a solution. Thank you for helping us keep our community accessible and equitable.
Across Europe, housing markets are under pressure. Housing shortages are growing, prices have soared, and access to affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult. Yet under international law, adequate housing is recognised as a fundamental human right. Every person deserves a safe and secure place to call home.
That’s why in this studio we depart from the simple but radical premise building upon the work of the international Housing First movement: a home should not be the reward for solving your problems, but should be the foundation from which those problems can be solved.
For many people experiencing homelessness, the current system creates an impossible situation. If you struggle with mental illness, addiction, debt, or unemployment, this often means that you have to first solve these problems before you get offered a roof over your head. But homelessness itself makes recovery far more difficult. Living on the street dramatically increases the risk of becoming physically and mentally ill, and your chances of rebuilding your life collapse. It becomes harder to access healthcare, attend appointments, maintain social connections, find work, or rebuild a stable life. Without an address, even basic participation in society becomes a challenge, costing society a whole lot more than providing people with a simple studio apartment to live in.
A home changes everything. It provides safety, stability, dignity, and a point of contact. With a place of your own, you can receive support, continue treatment, get retrained, find a job, and pay taxes. means that your therapist can reach you, that you feel safe, that you can get social services, and that you might start to heal. This is why social workers, doctors, police officers, and policymakers around the world increasingly recognise that a home, no matter how simple, should not be the reward for rehabilitation, but is a condition for it!
That is why the Independent School for the City is collaborating with the Dutch branch of the international Housing First movement, to organise a three-day research studio on the roots, challenges, and implications of starting rehabilitation with a house of your own. We will talk with doctors and social workers who desperately plead for this system, with people who have been homeless, about how getting a house has helped them. We will also look at the differences between cities that deal with homelessness repressively and those that ‘get it’ and deploy housing-first methods.
We will talk about how to get the Housing First campaign to make waves and convince our politicians and explore the architectural challenge of such a policy. It might seem counterintuitive, but the last thing the Housing First initiatives need is housing projects customised for people that currently live on the street, by designing specific floor plans or clustering the homes in collective developments. There is nothing that makes all homeless people different from you and me, except that they don’t have a house they can return to and an address to their name. They do not need ‘special’ housing. The community needs more simple but dignified, affordable homes.
Join us for three days of excursions, presentations, strategy sessions, discussions, and debate. Learn more about Housing First and how it can radically transform homelessness policy around the world, explore its implications for architecture and urbanism, and become part of the movement advocating for housing as a basic human right.
Studio Schedule
Friday 20 November
10:00 - 17:00 Lectures, strategy sessions, and excursions. More information will follow soon.
Friday 27 November
10:00 - 17:00 Lectures, strategy sessions, and excursions. More information will follow soon.
Friday 04 December.
10:00 - 17:00 Lectures, strategy sessions, and excursions. More information will follow soon.