Profiting From The Homeless

Cities After… with Miguel Robles-Duran

[S3.5E06] Profiting From The Homeless

Cities After… with Prof. Miguel Robles-Durán. A radical exploration into the capitalist contradictions of our urban world, and the many anti-capitalist futures to come.

The number of people experiencing homelessness has been increasing dramatically worldwide. This crisis has worsened in the past decade due to uncontrolled predatory real estate speculation, the harmful privatization of social housing, high levels of inequality, a severe shortage of affordable homes, and the lack of legal and economic support for social spending on basic human needs. Neoliberal capitalism is at the core of this problem. In this episode, Prof. Robles-Durán examines the systemic failure of governments, private-public partnerships, and non-profit organizations in addressing homelessness. This combination has given rise to an exploitative homeless industry that has profited from creating and perpetuating this social misfortune for decades.

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Miguel Robles-Durán is an urbanist and Marxist urban theorist working at the intersections of urban political-ecology, unitary urbanism, and the design of social and environmentally just urban processes. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Urbanism at The New School / Parsons School of Design in New York City. Robles-Durán is founding partner and co-director of Urban Front, a transnational consultancy for urban justice. He is also a founding board member of The Shape of Cities to Come Institute, a New York City based co-learning and strategizing platform for urban activism. Robles-Durán's work with the New York City and Rotterdam-based design cooperative Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra) has been influential to the contemporary development of socially-engaged forms of urban practice.

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Cohabitation Strategies: http://www.CohStra.org

The Shape of Cities to Come Institute: http://www.shapeofcitiestocome.org

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