City in the Sky Proposal | The Importance of the Section of the City

The more I look at the rooftop slum conditions, I am starting to think about what type of intervention I can make in Hong Kong. Right now, my mind is on a “city in the sky” ideal. I did some research on existing City in the Sky projects and stumbled upon this interesting Mega-Engineering Program about Tokyo as a Sky City. Check it out here:

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/skycity/interactive/interactive.html

To be successful in designing a city in the sky, I have to start assessing the section of the city in Hong Kong. Can I look at the slum-style conditions of fishing villages on the water level versus the slum-conditions of the rooftops? How are the rooftops accessed in section? Why is there no level 4 in Hong Kong buildings? What does a City in the Sky constitute in addition to simply an interconnected network? These are all questions on my mind as I prepare to venture to Hong Kong.

We're Going to the Rooftops!

As Hong Kong approaches and reviews have finished, I have been in contact with Dr.Ernest Chui trying to organize a visit to the rooftop slums so that I can ask residents questions, and get a better understanding of the physical and social characteristics of these communities. I am ecstatic because I found out today that I will be going on a trip to the rooftops!!!

Set for January 11 at 6:30 we will have an hour with the rooftop residents. The plan now is to speak with other members of the UD3 group who are interested in Sham Shui Po and plan out how we could make a book about the district, that intertwines all of our interests together.

I have also been looking to better understand the Tolerance vs. Demolition dynamic of the rooftop slums and Ernest Chui was kind enough to send me another one of his essays that provides a better grasp at this. The essay compares rooftop slums in Hong Kong with basement housing in Calgary. If anyone is interested in reading the article, I would be more than happy to share it! 

Rooftop Slums | Urban Typologies + Form

Constantly switching between model form, the studies from the book, and Google Street views, I began to discover building typologies consistent with rooftop slum developments.  I found out that not all rooftop slums are as small as they appear, and that there is in fact a wide variety in the actual size of residents’ homes. However, there is a pattern in the typology of the buildings.

From Portraits from Above: Hong Kong’s Informal Rooftop Communities three distinct building types are considered:

1. 4+2 Shophouses | These structures are the most densely populated and contain the smallest rooftop settlements, averaging around 100m² for five to six homes.

2. 9+1 Row Houses | These structures can be compared to row houses in their formal quality, as they exists across the rooftops of a series of uniform buildings. They are traversable growing almost like parasites over building barriers to create a community. The average houses here are around 25m².

3. 12+1 Residential Buildings | These structures are much larger in scale than the others and most residents have ample space with homes averaging around 60m².

The best explanation for the variance is that the residents of rooftop communities must climb to their dwellings, which creates a natural pattern of more density on top of lower buildings.

When in Hong Kong, I plan to travel around Sham Shui Po looking for these distinctive building typologies and trying to discover if indeed these patterns are evident. 

Sham Shui Po | A Case Study

Having a basic understanding of the rooftop slums in Hong Kong, I began to look at census data of the temporary housing conditions throughout Hong Kong, hoping to be able to jump to a neighborhood scale and find a district I could focus on.

I discovered that the district of Sham Shui Po is considered the poorest within Hong Kong, and because I have been interested in the divide between the poor and the rich, it is here that I decided to focus my studies. I also noticed that Sham Shui Po remains a very residential district, and has some of the oldest buildings from the 1950’s and 1960’s, upon which the rooftop slums tend to exist.  Sham Shui Po is located on Kowloon and has around 356,600 residents.

I began by going back to Google Earth and trying to map out what I could see from imagery that appeared to be rooftop slums. The map below is the result of that investigation.

From here, I went back to the book Portraits from Above: Hong Kong’s Informal Rooftop Communities, by Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham, and started to re-read some of the stories of the residents in the Sham Shui Po district. I chose to start translating the information from the book into physical forms in the hopes of discovering something new about the slums. Are they identifiable from Google Earth images, and what building typologies should I be looking for?  

Rooftop Slums | The Political and Social Story of Migration

What was the timeline and larger social and economic context of the migration patterns into and out of Hong Kong? What effects did these have on the housing conditions, and the demand for public housing? How were the rooftop homes then allocated and by whom? These were the types of questions I was starting to ask to understand why the rooftop slums have come to exist in Hong Kong. 

With the timeline of migrations in place, I began to consider how the rise in population and its snowball effect on the housing crisis plays a role in the existence of the rooftop communities. I found that the current waitlist for public housing in Hong Kong is greater than 150,000 people which is a large factor in why people in Hong Kong seek rooftop dwellings as an alternative. But how then are these temporary "homes" allocated and who actually owns them? 

Through speaking with Dr.Ernest Chui, I discovered that the rooftops have a very specific ownership structure. The residents on the top floor of buildings in Hong Kong have right to the rooftop space above and are free to do with this space as they choose. Many of these residents, therefore, seek to make a higher income by creating a rooftop structure and renting it out. From here, I felt it was time to understand the building typologies so I knew what I was looking for when I go to Hong Kong.