Community life on demand in ground-floor shop spaces: A tactical place-making initiative in Hong Kong

Abstract

Pop-up design helps steer city regeneration and community revival. With this belief, Hong Kong-based social creativity studio One Bite Social launched the urban ‘matching’ platform ‘Project House’. Using a tactical place-making approach, it pairs up vacant shops with local social groups facing spatial needs. The win–win results bring local exposure to pop-up vacant shops while providing marginalised community groups with adequate space for new social practices. Can tactical place-making become a tool to create space for place-based community development? What works, and does not work, at Project House, and why? How can Project House be applied to different contexts? By adopting a realist impact evaluation framework, this paper explores the potential of Project House, a first-of-its-kind tactical place-making initiative combining social work and architecture to create a new setting for a community.

Neighborhood as a place to foster generalized trust among young adults in Hong Kong

“…The current findings identify young people's residential neighborhoods as a possible avenue for community psychologists to establish trust. Results echo the initiatives in reviving local neighborhoods and place-based experiences in Hong Kong (Ho, 2020;Mui et al, 2020). We have to leverage the growing popularity of old local neighborhood communities among young people to create a sense of attachment to their residential neighborhoods for generalized trust.…”

“…This phenomenon echoes Forrest's discussion that neighborhoods serve to revive local traditions and rootedness during the process of globalization as local identities start to diminish (Forrest, 2008). In Hong Kong, there is an increasing appreciation of traditional Hong Kong activities, such as food and place‐based projects (Ho, 2020; Mui et al, 2020). For example, Sham Shui Po, one of the oldest communities in Hong Kong, was 2020 ranked the third most fabulous neighborhood in the world by Time Out (Ancheta, 2020).…”