在近年香港的建築項目中，「為社區建設」的意涵似乎已經發生了轉變和演化：「建設」的規模縮小，項目越趨成為容易被錯過的小型介入；同時，建設及改變所帶來的「空間」超出了有邊界規限的地方，溢出項目範圍，融入城市肌理裏頭的街道。透過近年onebite 在上環進行的兩個地方營造項目，我們嘗試解構社區建設不僅僅需要傳統意義上的建築空間，如社區會堂、遊樂場和公園，更需要微小有力的介入方式，打破項目邊界的邊界，進而以四行原則作為劃分基礎：以人為本、參與性、協作性和催化性。

Project House @1QRW

As architects,“building for community” has seen its meaning transformed and evolved in recent projects in Hong Kong. The act of building has shrunk in size, increasingly becoming small interventions perhaps easily overlooked, while space has gone beyond a confined site parameter and trickled into streets of the urban fabric. With two recent placemaking projects in Sheung Wan, we posit that community-building does not only require a traditional sense of building spaces such as community halls,  playgrounds and parks, but small interventions that spill over, delineated not by site boundaries but by principles of people-centred, participatory, collaborative and catalytic.
 
Community Plant Library: Reconnecting people and nature through the tiniest patch of green
Placing people at the centre of a project has become a popular notion among many professions. When we think of community-building, it is therefore only natural to place the starting point where the communities best understand and can easily relate to. Adopting their lens is how we picked the interaction medium and starting point. Plants, as we first discovered in seemingly industrial San Po Kong, might be at the periphery of our urbane lifestyle, but given a closer look, one would realise they represent local stakeholders’ significant care for the neighbourhood. Plants hence became our entry point for community building.
‍
Community Plant Library started in 2019 and has since gone through three editions respectively in San Po Kong, Sheung Wan, and Sham Shui Po. With each edition, there are three major elements: Plant Therapy, Plant Librarians, and Adapt Your Space, engaging three different types of stakeholders within a span of six to nine months per district.

Plant Therapy involved a roving Plant Clinic in the form of a van, with plant experts who could solve plant owners’ puzzling plant problems. It also served as a plant donation and adoption booth, where anyone could bring a plant home with plant advice that continued online.

In each district, a group of Plant Librarians were recruited from kaifongs and passionists to participate in two mapping workshops that focused on exploring the neighbourhood to learn more about the community, discover and understand plants, collect stories, and research the needs of the plant owners in selected shops. This information was studied in the co-create workshops where Plant Librarians came up with plant intervention ideas to help solve the issues raised by the plant owners, such as littering. They also brainstormed ways to display the stories collected, resulting in the Sheung Wan Community Plant Map and Sham Shui Po Community Children Plant Stories.

Adapt Your Space spotted and encouraged local shops that were already plant lovers, displaying well-cared plants at the shop fronts and alleys, to adopt a piece of street furniture that could house their beloved plants and solve hidden issues. The furniture was the result of the co-creation workshops, for example, a stand that holds the plant with an additional ashtray to prevent people from dumping cigarette buds into the planters and slowly killing the plants.

The underlying principle of these three major components is to create the possibility of participation. Creating different modes of participation appeals to various types of stakeholders, different modes correspond to varying levels of commitment and contribution, allowing wider participation. To illustrate, at Plant Library, the public can simply adopt and donate a plant as a one-off participation, yet more passionate members can join four consecutive workshops that require their active participation in observation, brainstorming and co-creation. In this project, we particularly engaged local businesses, which often get little attention in spatial upgrade projects. Here, they got an upgrade of their plants for free on the surface, but in fact, this project created windows of interaction between the shop owners and community members. The project gave them a taste of participating in and being part of a community project, eventually planting the seed for a bottom-up urbanistic transformation.

Our experiences reflected how such a spectrum of participatory opportunities require intentional design and curation, in order to make it accessible to participate, both in terms of time cost and commitment levels.

Community Plant Library

Community Plant Library

Community Plant Library

Project House @1QRW: Reconnecting heritage and community through collaborative and catalytic intervention
The idea of Project House sparked off in 2017 when there was a prevalent rise in vacant shops and a realisation of a constant supply of short-term vacant places in Hong Kong’s compressed-cycle real estate market. Meanwhile, there has always been a severe lack of accessible and comfortable space for NGOs and the community, be it public spaces, community halls or centres.
‍
Project House was developed with the mission of transforming vacant city spaces into a community-matching platform so that the right people can be at the right place, at the right time. With a vacant shop in Sham Shui Po, we kicked off the project and turned it into a pop-up community space for four weeks in 2017. Project House took on its life with two more pop-ups in Wanchai and one in Aberdeen, but was forced to pause as the pandemic hit.
‍
Fast forward to 2023 summer, Project House made its first comeback post-COVID at 1 Queen’s Road West (1QRW) in Sheung Wan. Located at a Grade 3 historical tenement building built before 1926, the space itself is an anchor in this community. Developing on top of our previous experiences, we envisioned Project House @1QRW to be a collaborative placemaking experiment in our city’s third space, furthermore, producing a catalytic effect that inspires similar activation.
‍
The power of collaboration shone through the seven weeks of pop-up at 1QRW. Over 40 partners were involved, from NGOs, social enterprises, to artists and collectives. This unlikely coalition was powerful, represented in how a cosy space of 300 square feet hosted over 130 events in 7 weeks. There were more than 1,300 event participants and we welcomed another 1,200 visiting the space. Most of the events were initiated by our partners, all excited for a communal space for happenings, onebite SOCIAL simply provided the branded and renovated space, promotion and logistics. The diversity of partners brought along events in all forms and nature, from traditional services such as health checks and free haircuts, to service innovation like talk shops for mental health, or arts and cultural events like movie screenings, busking, dialogue sessions, and second-hand clothes swaps. The plethora of natures attracted all types of people and spoke to their respective needs and preferences, whilst facilitating connections that would otherwise never happen, a key ingredient for community building.

Given the small area, the intentional design of the time-sharing model allowed different types of events to have their share in this space. Kindness hour (11am-2pm) was a community living room for all to take a break from the scorching sun, serving mainly nearby office workers. Wellbeing Hour (2-6pm) focused on social services with mostly retirees and elderly served.  Magic hour (6-9pm) ran in the form of salons where deeper dialogues took place in the form of movies, conversations, and music, attracting a younger crowd from other districts. With collaborative efforts and curation, a place could be beaming with vibrancy and diversity.
‍
The spirit of experimenting was of paramount priority at Project House @1QRW, we wish to be a Community Springboard where new ideas could emerge and be tested to gain insights and improve quickly.  For instance, handicraft workshops and the sewing machine received much attention during the pop-up, with requests for clothes repair services. We immediately responded to the need and were able to gather more retirees who showed experience and interest in sewing, and attracted fabric donations from a neighbouring business. Together with a local NGO, we have since developed a new service idea of Sheung Wan Sewing Squad that trains and hires mothers, retirees and elderly residing in the neighbourhood to create products that make use of waste fabric. The squad provides flexible employment and upskilling opportunities, as well as the chance to socialise and form a support circle.
‍
While the point or place of intervention can be limited at times, we believe that the catalytic nature of the intervention can create ripples of impact that go deep and far. From Project House’s experience, unconventional collaboration within the community is the key to ensuring catalytic interventions. It identifies and pulls together resources that are otherwise isolated and even idle, ultimately generating more sustainable synergies that give back to the community.

Project House @1QRW

Project House @1QRW

Conclusion
As the urban and social landscapes rapidly shift, so do the needs and resources of the community. Community building relies heavier today than ever on bottom-up involvement. By designing participatory entry points for all, we are able to harness their contributions, bring the community together, and help cultivate a sense of ownership. This relies on us being more open-minded to look at and pour our creativity into the different layers of the urban environment where design can make a change and catalyse a movement. Our placemaking experiments have shown repeatedly that connecting multi-sectoral stakeholders in the community generates win-win community-building design solutions that could amplify impact and even, make it sustainable.