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Housing Equity Projects?

Part 2 Project 2024
Zhe Chen
Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK
This research explores the experience of living in unjust housing conditions in Hong Kong through the lens of interactive sculpture translated through architectural techniques to expand the influence and understanding of housing injustices across two distinct strategies. The first, "Pickled Hong Kong Olympics," is a long-term attempt to fundamentally alter housing policies through engaging the public and building a consensus to improve living quality via organized activities. The second strategy, "Urban Nomadism," is an immediately implementable approach to enhance the living quality of those on low incomes without increasing rent. Both strategies creatively utilize and occupy urban spaces through a series of events supported by performance infrastructure toolkits replacing traditional architectural detail drawings to support the public construction of events including sound, lighting and the growing of bamboo in public spaces. Composite performance drawings articulate the transformation of the social construction of ‘unjust dwelling’ through large-scale interactive sculptures stimulating emotional memories and physical experiences. With an intense scrutiny of real political processes and economic constraints on the housing experience in Hong Kong this project engages the full emotional creative energy of architecture as both a drawn and public performance to express a vision for improving the problem of informal housing in Hong Kong.

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2024
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