Master of Architecture Thesis Project | The Archipelago Studio | University of Toronto
NetworkS of Kindness, Production & Safespace: A Guidebook to Hong Kong’s Commons
Thesis Summary:
This project inhabits Hong Kong’s post-2019 commons. It questions how architects can contribute to and enhance social networks through architectural production. The ultimate product is a research and design guidebook, which includes catalogues, inventories, photos, and analyses of urban objects and fragmented commons related to bottom-up actions, as well as their architectural manifestations in the public realm. The guidebook generates a series of bottom-up design speculations and narrative approaches. These present an alternative future beyond the functionalist city, defining new, hybrid, and connected networks of kindness, production, and political safe space for itinerant populations and political mediators.
“As a designer, how can I participate in this bottom-up movement through architectural production post-2019? Can I use design as a tool to represent these emerging commons, networks and activities in a more visible, permanent and empowering lens?”
In responds to the question, I created a guidebook that records different narratives of how the people of Hong Kong form communities, networks and objects in parallel to Hong Kong’s development history and everyday circumstances. Through catalogues, analytical drawings, photographs and maps, the guidebook presents research, intervention methodologies as designers and a speculative vision for the city moving forward.
Book Excerpts: Research
Book Excerpts: Speculative Design Proposal
The Bottom Up City : A Speculative Proposal
The Bottom Up City is a speculative world constructed by stitching together 8 site specific interventions serving 3 agents in the interviews of the guidebook (chapter 4), i.e. the homeless, the farmers and the political mediators. Through the lens of a character wandering through the city with his friends, the video imagines what Hong Kong could look like when the needs of multiple narratives are reimagined as shared social infrastructures and locally sourced architectural elements are hybridized.
Complete Book (First Edition)
The Bigger Picture
This map is an overview of how the interventions proposed fit back into the bigger networks that already exists in the city. It also projects how these pilot interventions creates and catalyzes formation of new commons/ networks. To zoom in on the map, visit my Miro board here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lbq2x1k=/
To learn more about other projects in the Archipelago Studio, visit https://archipelago.city/Thesis