Unbuilding Hong Kong. An error-correcting approach to public space in highly urbanized context

Rural-urban migration is a global phenomenon in which architects’ and urban planners’ attention has been geared towards for a few decades now, fostering the birth of many skyscrapers and hyperblocks. Although new opportunities are presented by these projects, we want to present the aftermath of hyper-urbanization in the record through the example of Hong Kong, a city that houses an addition of approx. 1 million people every decade. With spatial efficiency as the foredriver of the city’s development, how do we make space for the public? What are the effects to a lack of public spaces and how to rectify it after the errors were made? These are the questions we should ask for every big city. Despite recent threads, Paris remains a metropolis with huge influx of immigrants and visitors and is undergoing a vigorous movement of transforming the nooks and crannies of the city into lively public spaces. With the analysis of these qualified spaces, we will explore the possibilities to apply the theory to a context of much higher density.