Sustainable Communities

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Recognition of the character of the neighbourhood as an urban home to a variety of street inhabitants was an important aspect of the urban design process. Two members of the collective, Lorraine Oades and Ana Rewakowicz, interviewed social workers, and digitally recorded Aki Tchitacov, of le Bon Dieu dans la rue (loosely translated as A Benevolent God in the Streets), a local organization that works with street youth. He explained how any radical transforming of the neighborhood destabilizes homeless youth, who are fundamentally in search of some stability, and suggests some successful initiatives including a roaming booklending programme. He made the following comments, “There’s a lot of people in our society who are not far away from being on the street.


Housing - let’s start off with housing. We have a problem with affordable housing in the city. That’s very basic. So if you don’t have anything to have anything to latch onto - if you’re a person in the street and there is nothing to latch onto - Where do you go? where do you stay? Where do you live? Society has to understand that its conventional definition of living space doesn’t apply in some quarters - the living space for my kids. Public space -- that can have some use. Our kids are very artistically inclined. Maybe having more outdoor
graffiti areas in the summer... One of our more successful little programmes, that we started and we spun it off, was a mobile library, but run by somebody who knows the street population… and have books and magazines and just go to the park and have the kids, have people come and pick up what they wanted and discuss everything from politics to the environment. But what has to happen is, there has to be some kind of mechanism, some sort of synergy where these people also will have some sort of place in our communities and be able to set it up in such a way that different segments of our society can coexist. And it all starts out if you give these people some stability. That’s where you have the opportunity to maybe, to make them less vulnerable ,make them less dependent and you have to start off with stability for these people to be able to
feel…”