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DESIGN STATEMENT

Finding Resilience:

A Grassroots Response Towards New Normal in Everyday Transient Community

COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted not only hidden problems, but also directions towards our future. Studies on consumption behavior show a significant shift towards digital platforms. Though digitalization will only grow in the near future, COVID-19 has accelerated this process. Hidden a click away from the online platforms are the traditional businesses that are facing the struggle to adapt to the new normal consumption tendencies. Innovation and adaptation is not foreign to Hong Kong, a city known as an international commerce centre. Yet, within the dense urban fabric of this city lies the vibrant hawker community - whose presence is integral to Hong Kong’s culture, but remained in transience. Known for their retractable and movable structures, we delve into the Hawker Community in Sham Shui Po district to discover another facet of resiliency in this new normal.

Instead of making grand style changes to the local businesses, small scale changes can be adopted in creating flexibility in this presumably temporal but uncertain time. Making use of the found artefacts around Pei Ho and Ap Liu Street, strategies of deployment and mobility of the hawker’s everyday furnitures are rearranged and deconstructed - through its spatial and materiality - showcasing resilience from affordable, accessible, and modular adaptation.

In between the state-of-the-art towers of Hong Kong, lies these traditional businesses. Noticing their inability to cope with the digitalization, this accelerating shift towards digitalization seemed to be wiping out this traditional hawker culture bit by bit.

This traditional culture is rooted in physical transactions, yet, this goes against the very nature of social distancing within the COVID-19 pandemic. However, humans are still social creatures. Confined to personal spaces, the need to explore these areas despite the risk serves a sense of satisfaction, proven otherwise with the ever-crowded condition of the hawker stalls.

Looking into the vulnerability and temporal nature of this marginalized community, the potential of resilience designs will address the deep rooted but hidden resilience within. Being regarded as the poorer community, it often finds ways to survive and adapt; the vernacular architecture of the hawker stalls itself, is an illustration of adapting limitations and its flexibility. In our proposal, we aim to highlight and accentuate this hidden beauty.

Our design methodology comprises setting distance and creating screen of rhetoric representation of social distancing and mask wearing; it is a series of 6 proposed possible systems and conditions, which also involves existing objects found on the hawker street. Ultimately, by showing regular units that are forming a street system, we would like to contrast it with the current hawker situation. There is not a final conclusion, but a cluster of variety conditions, for which hawkers are flexible in choosing their own fits, exactly like how they have adapted in the vibrant streets of hawker stalls, and showcasing their resilience.