Stephanie Tung

Network of Kindness, Production & Safespace: A Guidebook To Hong Kong’s Commons

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. <br /> <br /> “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?”<br /> 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.

Research Excerpts
The thesis begins by investigating and documenting actors that shaped our city through bottom-up methods, including the understanding of social & spatial contracts within different commons, mapping of social networks and documentation of urban objects. These information are later translated into catalogue, inventories and photos that act as a depository to inform architectural inventions in the speculative design proposal.

Design Intervention Typologies
In responds to the aftermaths of the 2019 political crisis, the speculative design proposal is an attempt to present an alternative future of Hong Kong. To develop the city through the collaborative forces between bottom-up communities, instead of relying solely on the government. The alternative city vision is developed based on a new, hybrid and connected networks of kindness, production, and political safespace for itinerant populations and political mediators. The invented architecture design & typologies also aim to reinforce the identity of bottom-up production through the architectural aesthetics as well as model of production and material tectonics.

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=/

The complete digital version of the guidebook here