Shing Wong Street Community Living Room: A Toolkit of Community-Driven Micro Open Space Design

Wei Ting Sheng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Social Science, Urban Studies Programme)

In the context of Asia’s world city, the discussion of living quality in Hong Kong has been brought to a new level in recent years. The methodology of generating new public spaces around urban area has become the hot issues. Activists, professionals and citizens organized NGOs and community initiatives, while the government gradually increase the flexibility of application of government-owned vacant land to community-driven open spaces.

Community-driven design is not an innovative topic in modern Asia. However, similar schemes had not appeared in Hong Kong because of the lack of collaboration between civil society, private sectors and the government. To introduce an alternative to Hong Kong citizens, the newly established NGO CollaborateHK raised a new approach to community initiatives in October 2018, promoting community-driven micro open space design to people.

This particular project aims to conduct a pilot study in Hong Kong, Sheungwan, under the new framework. By following up on the newly established local initiative, Friends of Thirty-houses(卅間之友), and their kick-off project of applying government-owned vacant land to community public space, the project anticipate the ongoing bottom-up power of Hong Kong and positive feedback from the authorities. At the present stage, the perseverance of local people has successfully hindered the further development of Urban Renewal Authority in local area. While they are continuing to develop the community identity by holding events like movie nights and public space design focusing group, this participatory research is playing a role of taking records of this first case study of CollaborateHK scheme. This participatory research project includes overseas precedent studies, present urban context analysis, practical community intervention and the tracking plan for future development, hoping to enlist a series of practical approaches as a toolkit for future sustainable community-driven design in Hong Kong.