What does it mean to live in the city without a place you can call your own? What role can architects have in addressing homelessness? And how can cities become a better home for all? The documentary film What It Takes to Make a Home follows a conversation between architects Michael Maltzan (Los Angeles) and Alexander Hagner (Vienna), who have been grappling with these questions over many years and through various projects.

What It Takes to Make a Home is screening online on Facebook and YouTube, on 27 November, at 1:30pm, and is followed by a live panel with Cristina Cielo, Juha Kaakinen, and María Inés Plaza Lazo, and moderated by Giovanna Borasi, Director of the CCA, will consider responses to homelessness coming from the Global North and Global South, and their implications for the role of the architect.

Juha Kaakinen is the CEO of Y-Foundation, Finland’s largest non-profit housing association, and a key figure behind the country’s Housing First policy.

Cristina Cielo is professor in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Ecuador. Her work in Ecuador, Bolivia, the Philippines, California, and South Africa has focused on the subjective and political dimensions of economic inequalities, produced through the violence of contemporary forms of property and authority.

María Inés Plaza Lazo is an art historian and curator, and co-publisher of Arts of the Working Class, a Berlin-born homeless multilingual street newspaper published every two months, which includes contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and countries.

The event is free and no registration is needed. It will be streamed on the CCA YouTube channel and on Facebook.

2019 | 29 min
Canada
Digital film
First film of a three-part documentary series

Conceived by Giovanna Borasi
Directed by Daniel Schwartz

This film received the generous support of a private donor.

Film produced by the CCA, event presented in collaboration with Architecture sans frontières Québec, and in partnership with the Architecture & Design Film Festival, and Arts of the Working Class.