MEGA (municipal services) BOX

Hong Kong as a tourism-driven and a high density city, there are hundreds of malls are occupying so much space and mainly serving the tourists nowadays. On the contrary, the supply of municipal services is unstable, some districts are even below the standards. In order to serve the community better and take care of the growing population, I propose to insert municipal services into shopping mall.

This would be a win-win situation, because of the internalized spatial arrangement of mall, some leftover spaces created are not really welcome for commercial use. If leftover space be re-activated, it will attract more people to come to the mall and stay longer, which means shops will have higher exposure and higher flexibility for different kinds of tenants. And my thesis is testing out if there are any alternatives of coexistence of private commercial mall and municipal services.

My selected mall is a vertical one called MegaBox in Kowloon, which is the biggest and tallest one in Hong Kong.

And the leftover is mainly located around the periphery of the mall.

for example space blocked by escalators on ground level; blocked by E&M services, core structures and far away from the main circulation, some over sized spaces and wasted space like podium separated by car ramp and public space created by set-back approach for gaining extra GFA and low usage of car park space and odd space created by accommodating the circulation to car park.