No better word than ‘transformational’ to describe this national initiative whose purpose is to provide supported housing for the homeless — a Housing First Common Ground initiative to gear up people back into community and to independence from the winds of fate and life errors that reduced existence to a trolley of blankets and personal belongings at best, and life on the streets.. The scheme has already been deployed in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane.
There will be critics who at their worst may say ‘being on the street is their own doing…let them get their act together… ‘Be a man’ …or ‘woman’. The other view, arguably making more sense, is that
These people are part of us. If it is happening to them, it could be happening to me. How many lives give proof of a reversal of fortunes? We have a duty as a civil and prosperous society to support those find themselves at the mercy of traumatic change.
With a capacity of 70 self-contained units, the scheme includes on-site 27/7support, social activity spaces, home office hubs and leases for complementary social enterprise spaces – leading to stability of accommodation and new social and employment skills.
The WA Government led City of Perth, Perth Common Ground Project, to be located in East Perth near Wellington Square has called for leading architectural consultants. Nexus Architectural has put its team in the ring as part of a co-design process – architects, facilitators and stakeholders. Garry Baverstock/ Ecotect, SIA/ Sasha Ivanovich, Lindsay Allen leading DMG, Craig Smith and for the social architecture component, Felicity Morel-Ednie Brown of Culture+ Context, are representing Nexus Architectural.
The project alights that ethos exemplified by Le Corbusier, nurtured at the core of European modernist architecture – to which architects, the Nexus team have been weaned – by design, create a built environment that betters the world.
We are onto it!
Prepared by Sasha Ivanovich