Project House
Project Period
July 2023 - ongoing
Location
Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Project Lead
One Bite Social
Project Background & Inspiration
Located in the heart of Sheung Wan, Yau Kee Hop is a century-old, privately-owned Grade 3 historical building; the owner decided to lend the building to One Bite Social for free to convert the space into a pop-up community space.
For One Bite, this project is a continuation of its Project House initiative, in which vacant stores were activated as pop-up spaces for communal events; with the belief that the community has much evolved after COVID-19, One Bite hopes to leverage this opportunity as a community “pulse check” to (re)discover what the community desires and needs.
What happened in the project?
One Bite Social has engaged Caritas as the anchor community partner as it has multiple community centres around the area; the One Bite team then designed programmes based on frontline insights that Caritas shared, and reached out to other local partners to organise various types of activities, such as:
Kindness Hour: a communal space for residents and workers to enjoy lunch bought from nearby takeaway eateries
Sheungwanese Shelf: selling products from fellow local stores in Sheung Wan, for example, books from Mount Zero Books
Workshops and events, such as community stitch, movie screening, and music shows etc.
Project Impact and Key Takeaway
Pop-up spaces can be a playground to test out social innovation ideas and act as a “community pulse check”.
The location of third spaces is a crucial factor – spaces located on the ground floor and in areas of high pedestrian activity are ideal because they are highly accessible and allows organic people-place interaction to take place
The Project Lead and the space’s neutrality are key to incentivise collaboration instead of competition between partner organisations.
INNOVATION
Opening up new possibilities for privately-owned historic buildings to be transformed into communal third spaces that add to the neighbourhood’s vitality
COLLABORATION
Cross-disciplinary collaboration between social workers and architects as they both participated in programme design and execution.
Opportunity for staff from different Caritas centres to connect with each other and co-organise events at a larger scale
EMPOWERMENT
The space acts as a neutral (safe)space for residents to connect and share their desires and needs with the community