The vital package living on the streets in global cities

The main objective of this article is to acknowledge and examine the material culture of the homeless in the urban context of downtown areas in Sao Paulo, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Firstly, I introduce some aspects of the complex process of vital package production, which concerns the social function of design and the role of products in our late industrial society. In exploring this process of homeless material culture, I then describe the reverse sense of some of the products and materials re‐functionalized by the homeless. Then, in a brief analysis of design, wasteful culture, products, life cycle and obsolescence, I claim that homelessness and design are linked to the public spaces of metropolitan areas and global cities, as a consequence of the social‐spatial exclusionary processes due to spatio‐economic conflicts that constitute contemporary urban restructuring

Business · Civil engineering · Context (archaeology · Downtown · Economic geography · Geography · Metropolitan area · Obsolescence · Political science · Regional science · Restructuring · Sociology · Urban culture · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Engineering · Public Spaces through Art · Marketing