Carol

When I was younger, I lived in an area known for its street prostitution. Naturally I got to know some of the girls that hung out on the street corner and used my side lane for a quick shoot or job. The neighborhood hated their stain, I was fascinated by them. Poor, beat up, bruised and spiritually naked people, abused by all quarters of our society, but existing and had been so for all human eternity.

I started partitioning the council for better street design for these hookers. Better lights, shelter, lockers for belongings, and small lockers for themselves if they needed protection! needle waste boxes, etc, you get the idea.. taking your pro public sleeping to extremes perhaps.. I liked the thinking anyway – not quite charity for the homeless, but harm minimization and a sense of self sufficiency in their own sub world…

I didn’t get very far with my partition, I was young and even more easily distracted.

Instead, the neighborhood become gentrified. Prices went up, police beats got a promotion, the street sweeper machine started doing more than one drive by a week… I dunno where the hookers went. They’re still somewhere I’m sure. Copping the abuse from themselves and others.

Here’s an appropriate photo from Laurent Haug, who notes that “the architect should be killed”.

It is the mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep.

In a society which nurtures people and fosters trust, the fact that people sometimes want to sleep in public is the most natural thing in the world. If someone lies down on a pavement or a bench and falls asleep, it is possible to treat it seriously as a need… But our society does not invite this kind of behavior. In our society, sleeping in public, like loitering, is thought of as an act for criminals and destitutes…

It seems, at first, as though this ispurely a social problem and that it can only be changed by changing people’s attitudes. But the fact is, that these attitudes are largely shaped by the environment itself. In an environment where there are very few places to lie down and sleep people who sleep in public seem unnatural, because it is so rare.

Therefore:

Keep the environment filled with ample benches, comfortable places, corners to sit on the ground, or lie in comfort in the sand. Make these places relatively sheltered, protected from circulation, perhaps up a step, with seats and grass to slump down upon, read the paper and doze off.

[Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., et al.: A Pattern Language. OUP, NY (1977)]

Shifting/dissolving the problem is an interesting way of looking at it. Maybe that’s where my ‘wider scope’ ideas should concentrate – perhaps the ‘structural’ category should actually encompass the wider scope ideas too: effectively ‘removing’ the problem by helping to demonstrate that it need not be considered a problem. It’s very early days with the DwI ‘method’ and this kind of re-structuring is exactly the sort of thing that will help develop it further.

To some extent the ‘Pattern Language’ approach might be better for some ‘design with intent’ problems (and ultimately, it might be where my research takes me) but one of the aspects I hope the DwI method will address is (in common with TRIZ) completely cross-disciplinary solutions. An architectural technique, interpreted differently, may be eminently suitable for application in software, or vice versa.

Donnella Meadows’ Twelve Leverage Points are an interesting comparison/reference point (thanks too for the pointer to these); it might be that intervention design (which leads me to this, addressing intention) is relevant here.
Thanks again for your input and I hope to keep everyone updated via the blog as the method progresses/evolves.

See: http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf

This probably comes closest to the “carrot”, but seems more like an approach to dissolve the issue (using physical space) rather than solve it.

Thanks for a great article, I’m looking forward to following the progress of the method.