The Urban Homesteading Project

The Urban Homesteading Project (UHP) builds temporary living spaces in public spaces out of discarded, donated and exchanged materials, as a means to create positive social interactions within a community.

Neighbors, friends and passersby are encouraged spend time in each temporary homestead and partake in activities such as cooking, gardening, sleeping and watching movies. After a period of time, all items brought to the homestead are distributed back onto the street and left available to all for the taking. By making representative living situations and inviting community members to participate in these fictional spaces, we transform the apparent physical configuration of a space and its social and symbolic dimensions.

Through collectively observing the movement of the street, the manifestations of change in a neighborhood and the flow of people, we unfold the multiple layers of a place. Each homestead is an investigation of community, available resources and models of sociability in the contemporary city.