Home Street Home

“The countless small actions of unknown people that lie at the roots of those great moments”, Noam Chomsky (2012)

《Home Street Home: Hong Kong’s Self-build Communities 》was a two-year intensive engagement design study conducted by Louise Wong, with residents living in Sham Shui Po, one of the Hong Kong slum districts. Instead of analysing the social situation of the homeless community with the aim of developing design solutions to solve the ‘problem’, the study is reframed around the ingenious ‘design’ skills of self-builders.

'Homeless’ is a word used to describe a person without a home and typically living on the streets. However, that a person is ‘living on the streets’ does not mean that they do not have a home. It all depends on the different definitions of home. In this case, there should be multiple versions between traditional forms of home to homeless, and we believe self-builders are those who can create alternative forms of dwellings. The book shares results from types of Self-build Homes (stories of 11 households ) and Patterns of Living; A photo journey of the matter is distributed throughout the book with the aim of giving readers an overall feeling of the real situation while reading its analysis.

We also included other scholars to enrich the wider context of the study. Will Davis refers to Rudovsky’s 1964 exhibition ‘Architecture Without Architects’ and Jacobs’ advocacy of respect for residents’ ingenuity in living in poor urban areas. Here he also points out that this study aims to break down assumptions associated with ‘homelessness’ and focus on the creativity of self-builders. Dr Liesbeth Huybrechts brings the discussion to a different scale by looking at the role of self-builders’ communities in the design of our cities. From an urban theorist to a sociologist, the next chapter is the transcript of a conversation with Dr Wong Hung, an associate professor in the Social Work Department of CUHK. Here he gives readers the local context including the political and cultural background of the homelessness situation in Hong Kong. Finally, our intention for the book is to suggest an open-ended study. Rather than forming any judgement, our goal is that readers make their interpretations, and create new visions of homelessness