Graduate Capstones and Terminal Projects

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Browsing Graduate Capstones and Terminal Projects by Author "Alig, Sam"

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    Carving a New Path Forward: Advocating for transitional housing to help mitigate oppressive forces for people disproportionately affected by homelessness
    (2021-06-13) Alig, Sam
    Homelessness is a racial justice issue, as well as a social justice issue, and finding solutions to house the unhoused needs to be viewed through both lenses. Individuals experiencing homelessness are not one homogenous group and seeing them as such fails to recognize the intersectional nature of people living on the streets and the disproportionate rate of BIPOC individuals experiencing homelessness. Landscape Architecture has been slow to address issues around houseless populations, as homelessness is often seen as a nuisance commonly addressed through defensive design strategies rather than viewing houseless individuals as stakeholders in the urban landscape that should be included. This work helps to expand how landscape architects address these issues through design and hopes to push the field in a new direction. Transitional housing offers a newer model of housing that is gaining traction in cities throughout the country and could be more widely utilized to address homelessness. However, current models of transitional housing often exist on the fringe of cities or within parking lots, erected as emergency solutions. This work seeks solutions to help integrate transitional housing into the urban fabric and advocates for transitional housing to be more widely considered by communities and local governments to help create a more equitable response to housing the unhoused, particularly for BIPOC members of communities. A literature review and recommendations from the Center for Active Design to increase civic engagement in public spaces served as the foundation to create a framework for the integration of transitional housing into urban spaces. This research focuses on three transitional housing communities in Eugene, Oregon to provide examples of how transitional housing can be integrated into the urban fabric in a way that is multidimensional with greenspace and food production. The examples include innovative solutions to water and sanitation in the form of anaerobic waste digesters that produce methane and compost as byproducts. These systems are simple, cost effective and can be designed in a way that adds to the vibrancy of a transitional housing community.