Community life on demand in ground-floor shop spaces: A tactical place-making initiative in Hong Kong

Abstract

Pop-up design helps steer city regeneration and community revival. With this belief, Hong Kong-based social creativity studio One Bite Social launched the urban ‘matching’ platform ‘Project House’. Using a tactical place-making approach, it pairs up vacant shops with local social groups facing spatial needs. The win–win results bring local exposure to pop-up vacant shops while providing marginalised community groups with adequate space for new social practices. Can tactical place-making become a tool to create space for place-based community development? What works, and does not work, at Project House, and why? How can Project House be applied to different contexts? By adopting a realist impact evaluation framework, this paper explores the potential of Project House, a first-of-its-kind tactical place-making initiative combining social work and architecture to create a new setting for a community.