When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
CLARIN

Turning A Grocery Cart Into A "Rolling Shelter" For The Homeless

Argentine architect Eduardo Lacroze's creation turns the ubiquitous supermarket trolley into a portable, private space for people who live on the streets. But it's not without controversy.

The award-winning rolling shelter.
The award-winning rolling shelter.
Miguel Jurado

BUENOS AIRES — Urbanites are familiar with homeless people pushing supermarket carts around the streets with their belongings inside. But now an Argentine architect has designed a one-man shelter around such carts, providing the homeless with a small room they can wheel around with them. The American Institute of Architects and the Atlanta-nonprofit Mad Housers even awarded a prize for the creation of this so-called "rolling shelter."

Yet Eduardo Lacroze's design is not without controversy, as critics suggest that his shelter only condemns homeless people to intolerable circumstances. Still, the "rolling shelter" could work perfectly in Buenos Aires, where about 1,200 people are thought to sleep on the streets. Manuel Lozano of a local NGO, Funcación Sí, says the number grows when considering those who have virtually no options.

"To those effectively sleeping on the street, you would have to add those in provisional accommodation, hostels, hotels or those on housing subsidy," Lozano says. "That is, people with precarious housing solutions."

The number of homeless people is growing in Argentina, though the problem is worse in the United States and is increasingly becoming a global issue.

The rolling refuge "grows" around the typical supermarket cart like an enormous boxy rucksack. The shelter hangs on the sides of the trolley, and when it's parked, opens sideways to create a sleeping space. It's made of reinforced plastic panels with air cells inside that improve the thermal insulation. A sleeping bag fits inside it. Its advantage, Lacroze says, is that it "resolves in a single element the issues of roof and storage for a homeless person."

He hopes to mitigate production costs with trolley donations from supermarkets. A unit currently costs $500. He is soliciting U.S. government help to build a number of these shelters to offer them on the streets to the homeless. "You could organize a system like bicycles," he says. "People would take them out of the shelter when they need one and take it back when they're done."

Photo: Lacroze-Miguens-Prati

Homeless people are a symptom of segregation inside big cities and victims of seemingly irredeemable economic and social marginalization. There are numerous, complex reasons why so many end up on the streets: addiction, family abuse or mistreatment, mental illness, extreme poverty and abandonment, among them. In all such cases, the person concerned has lost all social and family safety nets.

Critics say that this "solution" of mobile shelters will merely prolong the plight of the homeless, rather than solve it. Lozano responds that he is "just glad someone has started to think about how to improve the conditions of people living on the street." He says that condemning him for the idea is like "accusing a doctor of interrupting bleeding first before attending to what caused it."

After winning an award for his creation, Lacroze sought financing and company interest in making his prototype in large quantities. "Ground-level organizations like Mad Housers, which commissioned the project, are very skeptical about what public institutions and corporations can do," he says. "Our effort involves building a bridge with them."

It was the mobile and provisional nature of the concept that most caught the attention of the prize-giving jury, which included architects, industrialists and homeless people.

"They saw the shelter more like a suitcase than a house, as something more accessible, which people can maintain and take around," he says. "A first step toward a definitive solution."

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

Keep reading...Show less

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

You've reach your limit of free articles.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime.

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Ad-free experience NEW

Exclusive international news coverage

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Monthly Access

30-day free trial, then $2.90 per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch

The latest