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Homelessness
Welcome to this special, larger issue of Design Philosophy Papers. It marks our new approach, which is to publish less issues per year (four, rather than six), but with more papers per issue. Across the year, the number of papers published will remain the same.
The idea of an issue on homelessness was inspired by Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos's work with and about homeless people's communities in Sao Paulo. When first signalled as a DPP theme, we knew it was a concern that would become increasingly significant, but not quite as rapidly as has transpired, with the Tsunami in South East Asia, and now, nine months later, Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans - in both cases with massive death tolls and even larger numbers rendered homeless.
Of course, large losses of life, destruction of homes and infrastructure are regular features of floods and hurricanes in many parts of the less developed world - underlining the fact that these are not natural disasters, but the outcome of risky forms of settlement by large numbers of people whose choices are limited by history and economic circumstances.[1]
When such destruction happens in a wealthy nation which should have the capacity to design and build to withstand extreme weather events, we know something is up. The reason for the intensity of Hurricane Katrina was the higher than normal ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico where it formed. While there is disagreement whether this particular hurricane is an unambiguous symptom of human-induced climate change, it is worth bearing in mind that the thousand plus scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) directly attribute the global warming that has occurred over the last fifty years to human activity (mainly, the burning of fossil fuels), and that some of consequences they expect are cyclones and hurricanes with higher wind speeds and more intense rain, as well as greater frequency of other extreme weather events.[2]
So, from now on, expect to see a lot more people, in different parts of the world, made homeless by cyclones, hurricanes, hailstorms, floods, forest fires and droughts. As pointed out in Tony Fry's paper, already more people are being made refugees as a result of changing environmental circumstances than by...