Project Home Improvement: Movable Upgrades and Community Engagement in Hong Kong’s Subdivided Units

Abstract

Pervasive housing problems such as unaffordability, overcrowding and substandard services exit in the wealthy city of Hong Kong. Due to the disproportionately high cost of private real estate, many low-income groups that do not qualify for public housing turn to the informal supply of squatter settlements on village lands, rooftop houses, cage cubicles and subdivided units. This has created invisible financial, social and spatial networks that are outside of Hong Kong’s formal frameworks of public and market rental housing. The relevant issues are complex and range from public policy, planning and design, substandard construction, to poverty and social inequality. Stringent building control over existing village squatters, limited supply of rooftop houses and the extremely poor environments of cage cubicles have made one particular type of dwelling the most prevalent–Sub-Divided Units (SDU), this is often the housing of last resort for hundreds of thousands residents in the city. Project Home Improvement was launched in 2014 to engage with the residents and generate creative design solutions that could improve the quality of living, as well as gather in-depth knowledge to improve Hong Kong’s housing policy. By way of small scale architectural interventions, the project is a collaborative process between researchers and students led by the Hong Kong University Urban Ecologies Design Lab, the WAY Project, social workers at the local NGO Caritas, as well as families living in the SDUs. To avoid phenomena like rental increase and gentrification-led displacement the interventions must be light, mobile, and not altering existing structures. A key intention, as well as challenge, of the project is working with renters of the units, rather than the owners, to ensure direct engagement with the user group. The challenges and constraint focused the design of scaled solutions that would often challenge preconceived notions of environment, space, material, construction and the very definition of housing.