5Bridges - Creating bridges between homeless and local communities

The 5Bridges project looked at breaking the circle of social and spatial polarization, targeting the city’s homeless and socially excluded population. The project tackled the interrelated causal factors of urban poverty by creating a one-stop-shop in a new neighborhood providing comprehensive and tailored services interconnecting different social groups. Designed as a multifunctional area, the one-stop-shop proposed and tested new jobs, provided housing and health-related services based on a participatory approach to foster social integration and empowerment (including a neighborhood restaurant, urban farm, solidarity shop, temporary and social housing and low-threshold-care). Small-scale labs were set up allowing the homeless population to test and co-design the activities and user involvement approaches. It permitted this group to participate and connect to the neighborhood, therefore changing the perception of socially excluded groups. Together with the partnership, social NGOs, public services for employment, housing, health and police, as well as neighborhood associations were involved in the project implementation.

During its implementation, the UIA project has capitalised on its experience so that it can be shared with peers. The outputs displayed on this page are the result of this process.