Without a fixed abode sometimes by choice, but more often by necessity. An interview with urban architect Maurizio Cilli on a phenomenon that is growing in every metropolitan area in the world.
Without a fixed abode sometimes by choice, but more often by necessity: it is a phenomenon that is growing in every metropolitan area in the world, and should not be regarded as an emergency, but rather viewed through the lens of a structural transformation affecting part of our society.
So says Maurizio Cilli, from Turin, an architect, urban planner, artist, public art curator, researcher and experimental designer with the Fondazione Giulio Einaudi and, now, the author of the research project 'Senza casa, senza cosa?'.
Today the project 'Senza casa, senza cosa?' is a candidate to become a delightful, beautiful book available to purchase through the Produzioni dal basso crowdfunding platform.
The homeless phenomenon according to Maurizio Cilli: metropolitan emergency or symptom of a profound transformation of our society currently under way?
The premise of my work on this subject was that I tried to somewhat dismantle the worldview of those who experience urban realities in a condition that places the role of the home at the centre of the cell that generates family, permanence and stability around the individual.
I believe that the new generations will have a far more fluid relationship with cities than our own, and so the home — despite the fact that in Italy and much of Mediterranean Europe the symbolic and economic value of property still carries enormous weight — I believe this will gradually change. We can read it too in the resilience of the property market, notwithstanding the speculative bubble of recent years. In what is an acknowledged crisis, both banks and banking foundations continue to believe that property is still the safe-haven asset for a large portion of Europeans. In societies somewhat more advanced than our own, as in Northern Europe, this is already changing, in the sense that the choice of a permanent home in a permanent city is no longer at the centre of one's stable life plan. Work tends to fragment professional experiences, and this raises some rather interesting questions about the fact that in the future people will very likely tend to change the setting of their lives very frequently.
What was your approach to this subject?
Talking about this topic today raises a dramatic question. The first signs of this situation affect not so much those who have the ability and the financial means through their work to make it a choice, but there are combinations and sequences of tragic events — arising, for example, from the break-up of a couple or the loss of a job — that make it impossible to keep a home. From there, an abyss opens up, because confronting an existential condition without a home means looking seriously at this problem. When I first began to tackle this subject, my concern was to escape as far as possible from the rhetoric that surrounds it. I started out thinking I would observe the world of those who govern the phenomenon, but I realised that was not the right door through which to approach the subject: if I had, as I initially planned, tried to understand and listen to those who professionally manage the issue of the homeless, doors would have closed on me rather than opened.
I understood, instead, that the approach to governing the phenomenon raised questions that do not interest me — namely, the fact that the phenomenon exists as long as the criminalisation of those without a home exists. If the existence of people living in that condition were not considered a problem, an emergency to be addressed in cities, all the work around assistance would not exist. This is a contradiction that, to my mind, imposes a serious intellectual limitation.
So if the phenomenon should not be regarded as an emergency, what is the right way to address it?
What interests me more is a different attitude: today, if we look at Californian cities, or New York, or Detroit, they are beginning to have entire districts of people with no fixed residence. City governments are taking note and studying measures not to resolve the issue as though it were an emergency, but as a stable reality. It seems to me more urgent today to imagine a reflection on this subject that can engage people in a more incisive, more unflinching way, by shifting the gaze.
My work is like putting a foot in the door: there are doors that often close, that resolve problems in a certain way by providing a solution. With my work I try to hold back the easiest answers — the ones society renders conventional and to which we all conform. We need to talk about this phenomenon above all with those who do have a home.
The phenomenon of the homeless, of those without a home through necessity and poverty, is growing in every metropolitan area: are we prepared to deal with it?
Reading the reports of Feantsa (European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless) — the European governmental body that since 1989 has dealt with the governance of homelessness in a broad sense and has published reports on the phenomenon over the past ten years — it is a phenomenon with a truly worrying exponential growth, especially around the new "administrative entities", the metropolitan areas, that is, cities that have transformed into territories. Cities must become the mechanism through which to govern complex territorial systems that take responsibility for transport, and for a way of building social relations in the urban environment that are sustainable in both environmental and waste-reduction terms. This coherence that Europe imposes in certain cities of Northern Europe is already at an interesting level of maturity, but when it comes to Mediterranean cities and Italy in particular, we are enormously behind!
In Italy we have abolished the provinces — a system of territorial governance with permanent officials trained to look at the territory in an extended way. But today we still do not have a new system capable of planning with a new territorial vision. We do not access European funds because metropolitan cities do not, in practice, exist here. Milan still has no territorial plan. Turin has a territorial government, but not a strategic plan at metropolitan scale. And the metropolitan scale of Turin encompasses 314 municipalities stretching all the way to the Val di Susa. This enormous territorial delay also transfers to a problem as serious and urgent as that of how large a portion of society today lives in conditions of such precariousness that it could, from one moment to the next, with a single "switch", change its situation and lose its home.
So with your projects you want to make those who do have a home reflect on the very short distance that separates being normal today — living in a home — and suddenly finding yourself homeless, without a home?
I feel authorised to speak about it because I have lost my home: in order to keep my projects afloat I had to wind up my companies by selling my house. I live in rented accommodation and I don't know for how long, as I have no stable employment.
I take on the responsibility of bringing this subject into a bazaar-like context such as the exhibition 999domande in an institutional venue like the Triennale, and I know it may be criticised and may become a failure!
I work with risk: I speak to people who could become part of this at-risk social group in the near future, to those who feel secure but are in an unstable equilibrium, who do not know what their near future holds when they wake up in the morning.
Read also: The best of the exhibition of the moment. The most intriguing projects from 999 domande
How do you plan to communicate these reflections of yours on the phenomenon of homelessness?
I have identified two registers for communicating these reflections, which I am keen to share as widely as possible not only during the exhibition but over a long period of time and with a broad audience. The first is a very personal register. I bring my own story here — a small collection of around a hundred objects to touch and move around. I asked myself: if I had no walls, no bed in a room, what could I unconsciously not give up in order to feel I was maintaining a sense of the domestic? I don't have the answer; I went quite a lot on instinct, starting to collect things from among what I already had and others I sought out and bought. Objects that convey to me this sense of the domestic stripped of a stable physical space. It's a game — a pocket-sized domesticity.
This is an autobiographical, very personal register that highlights my poetic relationship with things.
The other register is self-construction, salvage, bricolage — all fused with a poetic, personal, autobiographical approach.
Without a home, without a thing? What are the primary objects we need if we no longer have a home?
To help people understand more broadly what someone who no longer has a home is missing, I came up with this question "Without a home, without a thing?" in collaboration with Gaia Rayneri, a young Einaudi author. She distilled my project to its very essence.
I thought of working by imagining the construction of a handbook — along the lines of the Hoepli manuals from the turn of the century, when the pleasure of doing things yourself, the "do it yourself" approach, first began.
I like the idea of a small booklet gathering a series of easy exercises, all costing under 10 euros. For example: how do you build a thermos that actually works? The ones on the market cost at least 35 euros. I propose one that costs 6.50 euros using insulating foam and a two-litre glass bottle of fruit juice. How can the metallic blankets used by the Red Cross be used in an intelligent and stable way — not simply as blankets? They can become fantastic radiant panels: cooling in summer, and in winter they can cover your dwelling and keep you warm.
I bought a beautiful German rain cape for 4.40 euros and I'll transform it into a shelter using a tube connected to the ventilation outlets of banks, which work at night even when the branches are closed.
How do you use a 9-volt battery costing 1.50 euros to power 3 LEDs at 0.50 euros each, which give off a great deal of light? If you put them inside a glass of water you can illuminate a very large area.
I am drawn to the dimension of the small — the very small, the inexpensive, found everywhere — to construct little life-saving objects that keep you warm and give you comfort.
For the project "Senza casa, senza cosa?" you have involved many people with different specialist skills who have become passionate about the project: who are they?
Yes, let me mention a few: Remo Ricchetti, an engineer who works on highly sophisticated things — with him I'll try to use a solar cell removed from a discarded household appliance. This project fits very well with what urban society throws away: an enormous amount of technology is discarded because we are slaves to very short technology lifespans. Today a cathode-ray television, which contains treasures in terms of components and materials, has no value and is not even accepted if you try to give it away, because everyone wants HD technology. The same goes for a phone like the old BlackBerry, which I want to get running on a solar cell.
With artists Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna — he a naturalist-agronomist and she an architect — who are experts in edible and cosmetic plants. We'll collect edible plants in the park and see whether any are suitable for making an omelette or a body cream. The idea with them is to produce a mini-herbarium of the pavement botanist.
I'll physically build the objects here at the Triennale with many other people. Then there will be a manual gathering them all together, edited by Federica Boràgina and Giulia Brivio for Bôites Editions in collaboration with Base, and a crowd-funding campaign will be organised to support the publication.
It is, in short, a major performance grounded in concrete content upstream, and in a precise analysis of the phenomenon. The outcome may be purely communicative: stimulating generative questions.
Read also: Stefano Mirti. Con queste 999 domande scopriamo che il futuro dell'abitare è qui
What are the main objectives of the project "Senza casa, senza cosa"?
I speak to people who could act to change things.
Opening up to the dimension of individual awareness is my primary objective. You take home a stimulus, a thought, and you think about it when you go to bed. It has to serve to build greater shared awareness of the phenomenon, because if I were to lose my home I'm not sure whether, out of embarrassment, I'd manage to go to a shelter or the Cottolengo soup kitchen.
I would like the social system — as in California — to acknowledge that the phenomenon exists, and for city government to stop viewing it through the lens of emergency.
What interests me more is that this continues today to be an individual phenomenon of urban struggle, and I want to make people who still have the scope to become aware of it reflect on it. Society changes if a thought is shared and spread, eventually leading to the definition of new concepts.
I have first-hand experience of this — I'm not just recounting it: for several months I served fruit and dessert at the Cottolengo canteen to 450 people a day, people who have nothing.
We need to start believing that change is possible if society produces evolved systems of coexistence and housing capable of freeing us from the emergency of the shelter. The shelter is a prison camp — I cannot bring my own belongings, every day I must leave my locker untouched, and if I leave something in it there is a risk it will be ruined because it gets disinfected.
Purely theoretical for now, or do you see any constructive solutions?
Let me give just one example: Turin has 60,000 empty dwellings. The current demand from homeless people is a tenth of that. It would be possible to address the phenomenon by permanently providing homes to families, but individuals who have no one left could become part of gradual housing reintegration projects — what in England they describe with the motto "Way home": projects based on accepting the fact that someone may decide at a certain point in their life to exclude themselves from society. That is the point: we need to change our perspective.