Tin Shui Wai: Helping the City Revive: Street Re-design

Authors. LAU Ho Long, TSUI Kong Tai, YU Ka Lok

During the last decade, many family tragedies occurred in Tin Shui Wai (TSW). As a result, this new town has been labelled as the city of misery. It reveals that the underprivileged families in TSW face a lot of problems. In this project, we want to address one of the unsustainable issues: unemployment.

In 2006, the unemployment rate in TSW was 9.1%, which is substantially higher than other districts. Many people cannot find jobs and feed themselves, and rely heavily on the resources and assistance from the government. The problem arises because the prosperous places in TSW are rather little and discrete, and are usually shopping malls instead of ground-level shops.

To address the problem, we used the approach of street re-design. We tried to revitalize the economics of TSW through redesigning some empty areas to be small-scaled shopping places with ground-level shops and resting areas so that TSW can be a new leisure place other than Tuen Mun and Yuen Long in New Territories. As a result, more jobs can be created and some residents can run their own small business in TSW.

However, it would not be realistic to change the whole city at once. Hence, we implemented this idea in the square outside the Tin Shui commercial complex. We made a 3D model, which can be opened by a free software called Google Sketchup, that shows the appearance of the square after its re-design. The details of the design were also included in a poster.