Paris Daily Photo had a very interesting post this week. In Paris last year the Médecins du Monde (World doctors) gave the homeless on the streets of Paris, 300 brightly colored tents to draw attention to the problem and get the government to pay attention to it's crisis.
As they wished, the tents caused a big uproar in the city and Parisians started to put pressure on the government to do something about it. A few of the original tents still remain [and a great deal of funding was found for the situation] but this winter the project has taken on a different tone by another local group who installed more tents, not for the homeless but for those with homes who would like to experience living on the streets and then hopefully support the shelters.
According to his notes it's very controversial in Paris, as it would be anywhere I suppose. I wonder what they would charge a tourist needing a place to crash? Kidding...kind of.
via Paris Daily Photo [which generally is all lovely Paris and not political if you're a fan of the city.
© 2009 Apartment Therapy
A similar picture in yesterday's NY Times about L.A.'s Skid Row:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/us/31skidrow.html
The article reports that L.A. is allowing homeless to sleep on the streets until more public housing is created.
view cali-nys's profile
I can understand why Medecins du Monde took the step they did, and it sounds like it was effective. However, as for the local group offering the "homeless experience" to people who are not homeless but want to see what it's like, this is arrogant and distasteful. Do people really think that camping out for a few nights on the street when you have money in the bank and a home to return to accurately represents what it is to be homeless?
view geckotoes1's profile
Hello. I live a couple of minutes walk from the canal so I was interested to see this photo come up on the site.
Médecins du Monde have been giving tents out for a while a) to give homeless people a "roof" over their heads and b) to try and embarrass the government into doing something about the large numbers of people sleeping rough in Paris.
The Enfants de Don Quichotte stunt was to encourage all the tent sleepers to converge on the canal, almost overnight. It was an amazing sight, hundreds of tents lining the canal as far as the eye could see. They set aside a couple of tents for prominent politicians so they could come and spend the night if they wanted (!) and they also made a few tents available to rent by the night (it's a very cool bourgeois-bohemian area and, yes, I almost choked laughing a couple of times hearing hip young couples discussing in all seriousness when they'd be able to fit in a night in a tent between party-going and gig-hopping - "How about Tuesday darling?"). That said, it's worth noting that "solidarity" is taken very seriously in France, so sleeping rough for a night doesn't have the patronizing undertones it might have in another country. Also, almost all the tents were occupied by honest-to-goodness homeless people - all very well-behaved and excited for the first few nights but after that the drugs and drink and lack of bathrooms really became problematic. Not great.
Anyway, people were refusing to move until they were given supported accommodation and others were refusing to move full-stop, then the main organizer (an actor) headed off to South Africa for a job and everything sort of lost direction and turned into a bit chaotic. End result? No change. Still as many people sleeping rough as ever.
view El Jinx's profile
Photo coverage from December 2006: http://rion.nu/v5/archive/001303.php
view Genevieve74's profile