Housing is a Verb
Building Domesticity in Transience

There are currently 1,500 street sleepers, 100,000 subdivided unit households, and 250,000 dwellers in inadequate housing premises. Most are excluded from society’s housing safety net, while the remainder wait for the assignment of subsidized housing with no realistic time frame.

HK Government has been working with community organizations to provide 20,000 transitional community housing units in recent years as an alternative to the existing public-private housing market, which stirred an optimistic Social Housing Movement among the welfare sector at the beginning. After a few years of experimentation, with some pioneer projects recently being inhabited, we raise the following questions:

How do we evaluate the community building outcome?
What improvements does transitional housing bring to the inadequately housed?
What new elements does transitional housing bring to the local housing ecology?

To echo with the key topic of UABB 2022 Seeds of Resilience, Make Room Community draws our 10-year fieldwork experience in Subdivided Units and 4 years of engagement in planning and constructing Transitional Community Housing to conduct a mid-term assessment of the Movement, which also serves as a point of reference for public scrutiny.

Supporting the curator’s call for zero-waste exhibition, our key exhibition media – camping beds and insulating sleeping bags will be donated to local street sleepers after the exhibition period.