Mahdi Alkaifi - le Detournemant de Rue

Group: Dariel Levan, Mohammed Gueye, Sonam Sherpa

The displacement of people, ideas, and spaces via the pandemic creates an emergence of role reversals. The homeless are being permitted new sites of refuge, the housed are transient, claiming qualitatively different spaces. The city we thought of as stable suddenly has turned into a contentious space. The franchisers, the franchised, and the disenfranchised in our city are vying over emerging territories in the public and private domain. The franchisers are the authorities of public and private domain while the disenfranchised and the franchised are the participants.

Tension from media coverage and discontent neighborhood residents pushed the city’s officials to move the homeless from hotel to hotel, unsure where the next stop is.

When shelters in NYC become insufficient in the time of COVID, the homeless of NYC are bussed from shelters to luxury hotels. Amongst those, the Lucerne in the Upper West Side and many others, are showing an influx of homeless residents.

Mapping 18 of the appx. 700 hotels in NYC providing shelter and services to the homeless in the time of COVID. “Homtels” is a wordplay on the hotels becoming new homes of sorts. The Lucerne is highlighted amongst the others.

The locomotive facilitator of New York is not only shipping protesters but facilitating the transience of the homeless. Complaints of invasion are on the rise as the housed get out and the homeless move in. How could zones of erasure mitigate the unspoken blase between the homeless despair and the franchised leisure?

The Lucerne Hotel located in the Upper West Side in its subverted form, becoming a means of housing and transporting the disenfranchised from location to location.

One is transported from hotel to hotel with nowhere else to go, perpetually transient on the tracks of the city’s infrastructure. The mechanical tectonics of the subway suggests a subterranean automation of this disenfranchised transportation with tubes that intersect the subterranean levels of the hotel. These mechanisms emerge as a beacon or a snare, similar to that of the Sirens of Odysseus, these voyages serve as a lure for voyaging homeless sent to a subterranean doom.

By nature of a municipality’s infrastructure systems, this disenfranchised architecture weaves in and out of franchised spaces. These growing edges of inversion are a testament to a franchised membrane becoming porous and more erased.

Where have the homeless been going during the pandemic?

Here we have the 59 community districts of NYC. By mapping the sum of homeless shelters and hotels serving a district from April 2019 to June 2020. We’re able to visualize the transformation from hotel to shelter throughout the city.

Highlighted above is District 105, which saw the most increase. The red squares signify the change from hotel to homeless shelter and vice versa. They are enlarged in relation to the scale on the left hand side to show the changes within the districts of NYC.

District 111 had seen a decrease of 7 shelters, none of which being hotels. District 105, however, saw an increase of 12 shelters, making 91% of these shelters actually luxury hotels.

Above is a speculation of the intersection of mechanical tubes that weave themselves within the city’s infrastructure to create new spaces for the disenfranchised. On the left is the 79th Street subway station that has access to a space further below ground, resembling the typology of an underground station. The core of the Lucerne Hotel projects down and multiplies, perpetuating the intersections of tubes.