Disaggregating housing : soft and hard strategies diversifying spaces of public housing

Abstract

Public housing was keep evolving after the first establishment in 1954, after 60 years of development, public housing design especially the public space design is approaching to more economic, standardized and in other word “homogeneous”. That comes from the site planning to open spaces, from material scale to occupancies activities. While this design intention behind could aim to build a space that everyone can live in and act as stepping stone and leave the apartment to next one who is in need. However, that is not the case now, as people treat public housing as final destination, which reflected in the housing programme and age of people compared to age of public housing. While at the same time, the rich and unique history of Hong Kong has draw peoples around the world and form a diverse demographic composition. This juxtaposition of physical homogeneous setup and diverse ethnic user ends up in difficulty of building sense of belonging as well as the problems of cultural discontinuous and marginalization. Suggested strategy was aiming to make use of the event and festivals from these diverse ethnic groups under the current system of public housing. While, there is already event and festival in public housing which is not success, we need a new kind of implantation strategy, which is counter reaction to the problem of existing events and festival in public housing. First, existing festival only focus on majority rather than diversity. The suggested strategy combined diverse ethnic groups’ festivals and run as a combined new calendar cycle and linking public housing as city scale parade. Second, while each festival now is self-contained and unrelated, thus do not have the impact across site, estate and even city. Therefore, new strategy put public housing within the infrastructure and expand the impact by mobile structure across site, urban and even global scale. The Last but not least, current festival only plug-in and plug-out, which does not leave behind any physical evident to remind, sustain and advance relationship after the festival. In contrast, choreography of in site and off site material and management trading was associated and initiated with event structure, people are allowed and indicated to engage and negotiate with each other and manipulate the site as cultural landscape physically.

Finally, I picked Pakistan as example in order to make use of the interviews during the site visit, design research in terms of urban, estate and human scale as well as statistics were conducted and be further implemented in the detail design.