A Taxonomy of Hong Kong’s Infrastructural Spaces
"Background" has inadvertently become the new protagonist; conceived as an amalgam of separate elements bonded together by a potent adhesive of financial and practical reasoning, aka infrastructure, it is instinctively rejected as an example of vulgar opportunistic speculation, where developers and officials collide to maximize the rentable capital. The backdrop city has eradicated the notion of a planned urban vision, i.e. the city read as a holistic whole.
Architects and urbanists alike, for the last 20 years, have avoided addressing this issue and simultaneously failed to analyze its inherent properties.
This project will focus on Hong Kong’s residual urban spaces, hidden and forgotten conditions that have been created by the city’s extreme urbanity and by its vast infrastructural network. By highlighting spaces typically treated as residue, new potential opportunities can be created, at the same time opening the debate to the public and taking the ball out of the court of the developers to generate a new paradigm of social space.
The middle ground here referred to, is the “wasted” interstitial micro spaces found between Hong Kong’s infrastructural network. At a time when cities in China are developing at unprecedented pace, this project, consisting of both documentation and proposals, explores and manifests the hidden potential associated with urban wasted spaces and to kick start a debate on how such “waste” can be converted into an urban asset.
DATE_July 2015
STATUS_Research Project
PROGRAMME_Exhibition at University of Southern California "China in Flux: Mapping the Middle Zone".
SITE_Hong Kong
TEAM_Peter W Ferretto, Sungyeol Choi, Thomas Chee, Certina Chan.
