Exhibition on homelessness: “Who’s next?” in Munich – culture
Scary. Interesting word. On the surface of its meaning a synonym for threatening, terrifying, gruesome. But there is another meaning lurking underneath. The uncanny in the Freudian sense is that which was once very familiar, but which has been repressed and now returns in an alienated form in uncanny experiences and ideas. Homeless people are scary in the very literal sense, people without a home. But it also surrounds something eerie in that it reminds you of how fast it can go, that you no longer have any protective walls around you and have to survive outdoors in the open air. So in the first step you look the other way because: don’t be like the one on the corner! And in a second step it splits off the problem from itself, balancing out the one on the corner with a completely different, all-round anti-social.
The architecture museum in the Munich Pinakothek der Moderne has now dedicated a great exhibition to the threefold eerie topic of homelessness. “Who’s next?” – Already in the title question, it is emphasized that it can basically affect everyone, often an accident at work, a long illness or a separation is enough to be thrown from the previous life on the street. From the outset, the topic is not viewed as though it were through the aquarium glass – here in the dry we see how they try not to drown completely – but as a socio-political scandal.
Homelessness as the “ultimate social reminder” not to fall behind with the rent
Urbanist Peter Marcuse wrote of the United States in 1980: “Homelessness does not exist because the system does not work, but because it works exactly the way it works.” British sociologist David Madden of the London School of Economics goes one step further when he writes that the function of dying homelessness in the housing sector is to “serve as a threat”: not to fall behind on rent or mortgage payments. In no other economic sector does late payment have such catastrophic consequences for entire households. “
The sentences come from Madden’s catalog contribution to the Munich exhibition, which makes it clear that the worldwide increase in homeless people “is not due to a sudden increase in behavioral problems in the population” but has political reasons.
But now first into the good, heated, dry room, into the three rooms of the architecture museum. The first illuminated situation in eight non-European cities such as Tokyo, São Paulo, Moscow, Shanghai – cities that each accumulate and accommodate an enormous amount of wealth, but also blatant forms of poverty, exclusion, and misery. If the EU would finally spend more money on self-promotion, this space would be an impressive source of inspiration, as it shows with counterexamples how valuable the welfare state is, which tries to at least cushion the worst of poverty. In New York, more than 130,000 school-age children experienced homelessness in 2018, and the trend is growing rapidly: the city’s emergency shelters now accommodate 40 percent more New Yorkers and 70 percent more school-age children than ten years ago. In San Francisco, thanks to the tech industry, rents are so skyrocketing that even many employees are now living in tents. A software engineer there earns an average of $ 140,000 starting salary, a teacher 40,000. In London, the number of homeless people rose by 18 percent to 8,855 between 2018 and 2019.
By way of comparison: an estimated 41,000 homeless people lived in Germany in 2018. Andres Lepik, the director of the architecture museum, describes this number as a “national disgrace, because in one of the richest countries in the world there is still no nationwide strategy for improving or even abolishing the situation”. There are also no secured numbers. And the federal government has not yet reacted to the decision of the European Parliament, the answer to the provision of measures to procure homelessness by 2030.
When you read about this EU decision for the first time in the exhibition, you can’t help but laugh, because homelessness seems so natural. On the other hand, Finland put the issue on the public agenda ten years ago and has since reduced the number of homeless so radically that people no longer sleep in the room. Seems to go too. But how?
The second room of the exhibition shows best practice examples. Munich, the richest city in Germany, is unfortunately not included, probably because everything is great here. The examples show that it is not enough to simply put blocks of flats on the outskirts and then fill them with homeless people, because in such cases the ghettoization is already built in. That Vinzi Rast stands in the middle of Vienna, a listed Biedermeier house, decently renovated, ten apartments for three people each. What is special is the composition of the residents: half of the former homeless, the other half students, both groups are mixed across the apartments. The building opens up into the urban space, a restaurant, a bicycle workshop and an attic studio for public events refinance the house, which has been functioning for ten years.
Models like the Vinzi Rast may also pay off: The “Plaza Apartments” in San Francisco offer 106 one-room apartments for long-term homeless people, plus a shared laundry room, a garden … up to ten times less than for any homeless person on the street.
Or the “Habitat 016”, a two-storey emergency shelter on the outskirts of Frankfurt, the design of which the Green Spaces Office and some homeless people were involved in. The rooms are small, but the building feels as spacious as it is hospitable. Where previously tent accommodation sank into the mud, a long, shimmering blue bar now meanders through the dense green of the Ostpark. Narrow inner courtyards, covered arcades, open stairwells. The residents have chip cards and thus free access to their rooms.
Housing is a human right, not a luxury that man has to be able to afford
The exhibition rooms in the Architekturmuseum are rhythmically loosened up by advertising pillars on which texts in the form of posters hang. One of them comes from Leilani Farha, who was the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on Appropriate Housing” from 2014 to 2020. SHE traveled around the world to get governments to finally adjust their policies to the fact that housing is still a fundamental human right and not a luxury that can be afforded. She also contributes an essay to the catalog in which she attacks the governments of the richest countries hard for “concealing the connection between rampant property exploitation and increasing homelessness.” The real scandal, in their eyes, is that housing has been transformed from a human right to a commodity, property in compensation has been transformed into items of capital that are shifted on the financial markets like stocks or commodities.
All of this makes it clear that you have to talk about the subject differently. The exhibition organizers are trying a first step here by developing their own glossary, from A for “address” to Z for “foreclosure”. Juliane Bischoff from the Nazi Documentation Center writes about the term “anti-social”: “During the Nazi era between 63,000 and 82,000 people stigmatized as ‘anti-social’ were imprisoned in concentration camps. Stigmatized and persecuted people as victims of the Nazi regime by the German Bundestag released in February 2020.
To this day, homelessness is closely linked to shame, invisibility, and silence. Each of the 130,000 homeless children in New York will do everything in their power to hide their social situation from their classmates. All the more valuable.
Seldom does an exhibition succeed in turning a fundamental eye around. But if you unlock your own door after visiting the Pinakothek, everything suddenly works like a miracle. Dryness. Silence. A door that can be closed behind you. Warm water. And a sofa on which you can spend two evenings reading, painting and reading the great catalog. Pretty scary, all of that.
Who’s next? Homelessness, architecture and the city. Architecture museum of the Technical University of Munich in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Until February 6th. The catalog costs 38 euros.