Adele Kremer, master’s student in Urban Landscape and Planning at the Faculty of Environmental Design at the Université de Montréal, received a distinction for her master’s thesis titled: “Perceptions and Experiences of Women Experiencing Homelessness in Montreal’s Public Spaces.” Supervised by Shin Koseki, her work explores crucial social and spatial issues.
“Since the 1980s, homelessness has been considered a ‘social crisis’ in most Western cities. Since the 1990s, the growing diversity of faces and subgroups has underscored the need to reflect on their aspirations in urban and community environments. Recent spatial, political, and media actions have been radical, often excluding People Experiencing Homelessness (PEHs and FEHs) from public spaces. Strategies of invisibilization and isolation shape the profiles and practices of FEHs. Public spaces reveal social dynamics tied to urbanization and power relations. Security and risk management have become central to spatial design. This study aims to make women active agents in shaping inclusive and welcoming public spaces. Semi-structured interviews, using creative methods, highlight the factors that facilitate or hinder public space use by FEHs. These interviews illuminate the spaces participants use daily and their relationships with them. EMPC (creative participatory mapping exercises) focuses on the case study of La Place des Montréalaises (LPDM), where participants are invited to reimagine the space using printed projections. The expected outcomes are to give visibility to the lived experiences of FEHs, often overlooked by public space designers in Montreal, and to propose new perspectives on the presence of PEHs in public spaces—encouraging planners and designers to engage with marginalized groups whose views, in my opinion, have much to teach us.”
Congratulations to Adele for this bold and necessary research on women’s homelessness and inclusive urbanism!