‘Housing First’ is an approach to ending homelessness that centers on quickly providing homeless people with housing and then providing additional services as needed.
It is an approach first popularized by Sam Tsemberis and Pathways to Housing in New York in the 1990s (Padgett, 2007: 1928), though there were Housing First-like programs emerging elsewhere, including Canada (HouseLink in Toronto) prior to this time.
The basic underlying principle of Housing First is that people are better able to move forward with their lives if they are first housed. This is as true for homeless people and those with mental health and addictions issues as it is for anyone.
According to Pathways to Housing, “The Housing First model is simple: provide housing first, and then combine that housing with supportive treatment services in the areas of mental and physical health, substance abuse, education, and employment.”
As described by the Guardian:
“When he’s bored, there’s nothing Damon Albarn likes to do more than knock out an Afro-pastoral folk opera. Especially when it’s an Afro-pastoral folk opera about a 16th-century mathematician.”
The feeling that you may have just boarded a Scientology cruise ship is not accidental. It’s rooted partly in Silicon Valley’s techno-Rapturist soil, and partly in Anderson’s own evangelical yearnings. Those invited to speak at TED are mailed an actual stone tablet engraved with “The TED Commandments.” (One is “Thou Shalt Not Sell From the Stage”.) June Cohen, who runs TED’s media operation, told an audience two years ago that her sister-in-law calls the TED Talk “a secular sermon”. The atheist Daniel Dennett suggested that TED could “replace” religion, observing that it “already, largely wittingly I think, adopted a lot of the key design features of good religions”, including giving away content.
Really fascinating article all about the phenomenon that is TED.
http://www.afr.com/p/lifestyle/review/flat_out_talking_at_club_ted_pi8xrho3fx79WCiGkv1VeO
2012 is shaping up to be the year of the city.
This project from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London is a dashboard that displays a single, open overview of almost all available data streams across eight different cities.
It’s all part of the smart city movement, which looks to bring data around environmental and social capital into the urban policy and planning process.
And 2012 is also the first year that the TED Prize didn’t go to a person. Instead, the TED Prize for 2012 went to a thing - The City 2.0
TED prize 2012: the city 2.0 from designboom on Vimeo.
I spoke at Vibewire’s fastBREAK event at the start of the year on how we can all nurture our creative and imaginative capabilities and put them to use on the things that matter most.
The CASA dashboard project starts to show how we can take real-time urban data streams and use them to come up with creative solutions to the most challenging issues in our cities: public disorder, crime, and homelessness.
I’m looking forward to seeing the reinvention of our cities kick into gear in 2012.
