Post-colonial Hong Kong’s urban space and cultural protection under globalization: Multi-functional Civic/Culture Centre Design

Post-colonial Hong Kong’s urban space and cultural protection under globalization: Multi-functional Civic/Culture Centre Design

Wang, Q.

Bracken, G. (mentor)
Cuperus, Y.J. (mentor)

Architecture

Architecure Design

DSD

2012-10-30

Globalization is an inevitable trend that the whole world needs to face. Hong Kong is of course one of those global cities belonging to such a growing network. The politics of space comes in when the city needs new built environments. When people work in these spaces, they also require homes, services. In my design project, I will not do a Hong Kong urban space discussion on aerial view which cannot accurately reflect the daily life of urban status. In contrary, I will explore urban space of Hong Kong from microscopic, bottom-up (cultural), and ethnographic-historical points of view. When Hong Kong citizen discover that culture is difficult to be found, the fact is that they cannot see what is there. A kind of developing urban space in Hong Kong which experiences too fast makes people living in old or traditional community almost lose their collective memory and sense of belonging. As a result, my general research question goes to what kind of change was presented by 'urban space meaning' combined with cultural protection in Hong Kong. It is a research on Post-colonial Hong Kong’s urban space and cultural protection under globalization. In order to give a further study on this general research question, I found some problems need to be solved in my selected site after a site analyzing. Here I try my best to keep, or to say protect, two kinds of culture, one is traditional culture that facing disappearing and scattering named wedding-card making, the other is low culture in typical Hong Kong style named street market. Both of these cultures are located in a really high density community. And of course both of them have a close relationship to daily life. According to all mentioned before, my specific problem goes to first How to enhance space quality of communities in WanChai, second how to make interference without breaking community characters on history (Tong Lau) and culture (street market), and third what kind of protection can we make to keep culture on wedding card and avoid culture disappearing. I pay more attention on three important components as follows: street activity, transportation Mode and high density community. All methods of analyzing and problem solving leads to my final design, which will first keep and protect two kinds of culture I mentioned before, and then at the same time better the daily life and space quality of high density community in Wanchai where the two kinds of culture are located.

architecture
culture
history

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e4c0a971-2e86-487e-8304-a0b0d988d7b7

2012-10-31

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2012 Wang, Q.