Homeless Youths and their Environment(s) Uncanny: A Taxonomy for the Marginalised Voices

In 2024, circa 700,000 homeless youth, includingmigrants and LGBTQIA+ youth with different experiences as a result of their ethnicity and histories of relations, lived in emergency lodging each night in Europe. An obvioussocio- urban/architectural challenge exists, exposing underlying design, planning and governance weaknesses calling for a more inclusive and cohesive model. This challenge is not new; single institutions and networks have long attempted to solve it. While Montagu Burgoyne’s pastoral colony was a remote community for poor and criminal homeless youths where to study and learn professional skills (1829, Potton, UK), for example; the Vlassky Spitalin, founded by migrants’ networks in Prague, was an urban cluster of buildings providing shelter and training for poor and homeless young apprentices from across Europe, regardless of their nationality or religion (1601, Prague, Czech Republic). They did not necessarily portray a trend or universal phenomenon but suggested a correlation between single-handed and/or networks praxes and the spatial, historical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of socio-urban/architectural inequalities. By welcoming a robust review of past and present single- handed and networks praxes and their spatial, historical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of socio-urban/architectural inequalities debates and productions, this paper salutary inquiries into these aspects that have been syncretically inscribed in long-established definitions of the ‘humans’ – homeless youths – and have linked them to their ‘environment(s)’ - cites and their buildings, often hostile and exclusionary, from the early 19th century on. Consequently, the analysis will introduce an approach to their classification that has episodically been lost or forgotten by the mainstream urban and architectural profession and pedagogy. This allows the approach to reveal a taxonomy and its glossary with its own latent trans-critical position anticipating our disciplines’ capacity to join the rest of the humanities in bringing marginalised, suppressed or minoritarian voices to the fore.