Introduction: Cristina Steingräber
Talk: Daniel Talesnik
Impulse and Panel with Luisa T. Schneider and Alexander Hagner
Moderation: Andres Lepik

The ArchiTangle publication “Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture and the City” approaches one of the biggest social problems of our urban coexistence.

Homelessness – the condition of not having a permanent home – is an increasing global problem that needs to be discussed and solved at the local level and that, especially in recent years, has visibly become a concern for society as a whole. In many countries of the world, the political discourse has long been characterised by the erroneous attitude that poverty is a personal fault and that the reason for homelessness is the people concerned have not tried hard enough to find accommodation and a secure livelihood. However, it is important to refute this by contributing to the understanding of homelessness and illuminating the topic as openly and multi-facetedly as possible in order to be able to develop approaches to solutions.

Although architecture cannot solve the problem of homelessness on its own, the question arises: How can architecture, in cooperation with other professions, contribute to providing housing for people without shelter? With the help of the expertise of federal, regional and municipal authorities, non-governmental organisations, health care institutions and various academic disciplines, the editors and authors of “Who’s Next?” have set themselves the goal of investigating and understanding this real circumstance and making it comprehensible to others with this publication.

Numerous essays, interviews and analysis of architectural examples, as well as research on historical and current developments in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai, Shanghai and Tokyo, provide different starting points for understanding homelessness and the multiple problems that accompany it. In the book, the authors take different approaches to breaking down the issue of homelessness into as many parts as necessary to focus on the specificities and complexities of this urgent crisis.

Daniel Talesnik is an architect and holds a PhD from Columbia University in the City of New York. He teaches architecture and civil engineering at the University of Bath. At the Chair of Architectural History and Curatorial Practice and the Museum of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he worked from 2017 to 2022, he curated “Access for All: São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures” (2019) and “Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture, and Cities” (2021-2022) and is co-editor of both exhibition catalogues.

Luisa T. Schneider is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research in the Department of Law & Ethnology. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Oxford University and works on the anthropology of violence, privacy and law. Since 2018, she has been conducting research projects together with homeless people, exploring how they can maintain their privacy and intimacy when these rights are implicitly tied to the availability of housing.

Alexander Hagner is an architect and partner in the architectural firm gaupenraub +/-, which he founded together with Ulrike Schartner in Vienna in 1999. gaupenraub’s field of work ranges from building in existing contexts and urban planning designs to furniture and product design. Hagner has been involved in projects for disadvantaged people for over 15 years, such as VinziRast-mittendrin in Vienna. The special feature of the renovated Biedermeier house is the composition of the residents – half of them are former homeless people, the other half are students who live together in the ten flats for three people each.

Andres Lepik is Director of the Museum of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Professor of Architectural History and Curatorial Practice. After studying art history and writing his dissertation on architectural history, he worked as a curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and at the Architecture and Design Department of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, among other places. He specialises in the history and theory of architectural exhibitions as well as contemporary developments in the field of socially engaged architecture and participatory structures.

Cristina Steingräber holds a PhD in architectural history and is a publisher. In 2019, she founded ArchiTangle, a Berlin-based independent architecture publisher and tech start-up focused on knowledge transfer and projects of social relevance in the field of architecture. Previous positions include curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and more than a decade as programme director and managing director of Hatje Cantz, a leading global publisher of fine art, photography and architecture.