This project delineates two sets of strategies confronting waste management issues in Sai Kung‘s Urban and Rural areas (including villages and outlying islands). The first half of the work inspects an overview of Hong Kong waste management with an in-depth analysis of waste categorization and planning in Sai Kung. Leading to the second part as site-specific anticipation where design confronts systematic issues.

In the urban areas, a domain system is adapted as the managing strategy. Sai Kung Town (SKT) will be classified into six domains. By setting up committees, councils, and appointing superintendents, each domain will adapt its approach to deal with different waste types. The system aims to re-examine a closed urban system as “open”, where stakeholders will no longer rely on their economical bypass to obliterate social duties. Everyone then has a duty varying in their domain and sub-units, to manage or understand the process, effects, and aftermaths of waste. This is also a promising confrontation to educate the public on the landfill crisis and semi-invisible pollution we are harming at a global scale. An “open” system therefore also conveys more transparent spaces, acknowledging the traces and processings on the management workflows and to involve maximum participation of the citizens.

These strategies have also included the assumption to eventual failure. Instead of an overwhelming general fixation or reboot, this set of strategies values the “bonding” and “thisness” of praxis within the varying communities. The strategy proposed is based on “participation” which incorporates human interrelationships and their relationship to specific landscape natures, thus as long as an “open” community is preserved, there will be further interpretation and development of the processing and systems accordingly and in a variety of time-phases.

Strategy for the rural areas majorly focuses on interrelating the values of the villagers to the tourists by confronting communal spaces andsetting up instant waste processing management systems. Villages tend to create closed systems, unlike the urban sphere, systems and processes are privatized and centralized to the decision-making within a small village community. While it does not necessarily forecast that a closed system is non-beneficial to villages and is rather reasonable, connecting villages to neighboring villages or tourists will help them to understand, communicate and respond to the conflicts and misconceptions. Especially in a management system dealing with island wastes, villagers and tourists share the important responsibility to collaborate and react to the ongoing problems of pollution and accumulation. Therefore, an “instant” management scaffolding is beneficial to the idea. The scaffolding structure, similar to Cedric Price’s Fun Palace or any contemporary outdoor concert performing stage, is built within a short period without interrupting the terrain and vegetation of the landscape. Its morphological nature will be determined by the topography of the sitewhile preserving the flexibility to expand or shrink based on the need through time. The structure will be composed of mobile sets of incinerators, anaerobic digesters, and their relevant supplements as well as communal spaces such as amphitheater or intimate capsules (depending on the size of the scaffold and the purpose from site to site).

The projec was developed during the Landscape Architecture (with Waste Management Design and Planning) course at the University of Hong Kong.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

BW Urban cityscapes have been relying heavily on a “geographical abstraction” mode of living. Our civil spaces isolate ourselves from environmental issues, showing little awareness of the problems that we don’t see or tend to hide away from, just like greenhouse effects contributing to climate change or landfills that are located far from where we live. Importantly, Hong Kong has been facing many environmental issues however overlooked by current officials as oftentimes urban development agenda and pro-growth mindset had muted many green voices. With a huge fragmentation of responsibility and lack of communication between authorities and non-governmental organizations, I would like to suggest a new thinking on solving the city’s ongoing problems, starting with waste.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

BW The project raises concerns on public’s waste management liabilities and awareness. Subject to a collective participation at a community level, my work suggests the possibilities of opening up city systems so that the public could gain rights to act up.

Hong Kong had 13 saturated landfills and 3 currently working around the north, south and west ends. Problems with our waste management have never been addressed properly because we lacked centralized capacity to eat up wastes. As many reclamation projects were done before the 1950s, the city was so used to treating household and construction waste as major fill material for land. Previous incineration facilities before the handover had also failed because of the low waste-to-energy ratio and extremely high operating costs. With the present integrated waste management facility (IWMF waste management facility is currently at its Phase 1 construction and is expected to be fully commissioned around 2025) as our only incineration support for the landfill - capacity to only treat 3000 tonnes of municipal waste per day, which contributes to only one-third of the municipal waste received daily - the city setted up a serious challenge to solve.

The design framework tackles the issue by removing habits of a “throwaway society” and polluter-pays-without-consequences (referring to a thinking that money will help you solve the problem). Domain systems are aimed to raise waste awareness to the public through internal community engagements and communications. It is important to promote civic consciousness as a collective and to-be-cognitive awareness in the city. Therefore, the design valued voices amongst stakeholders and leaves the final decision-making process by each domain.

KOOZ How did you approach the research of the current waste system within Hong Kong? What tools did you use?

BW I have benefited on site-specific samplings, site visits, government public data ArcGIS analysis and paper-based research throughout my preliminary design. Although community-based participation is mutually important to my research data, short of time ultimately restricted me from the idea. I’ve started off with a more holistic overview of Hong Kong’s waste management methodologies between the urban and rural spheres with a timeline, guided by other important events such as the handover or GDP statistics. Later on, I’ve dived into the Sai Kung district (which is also where my studio project focuses this year) for in-depth analysis such as the bin-to-bin distribution, bin locations or land-use and waste categorization.

KOOZ What were the most significant discoveries? How did these inform the project and its approach?

BW As aforementioned, I have only come to realize that Hong Kong’s waste management failure is far more significant than I have imagined. But Sai Kung itself - as where my current design proposal focuses on - have also been subject to a few unexpected insights on its district ubiquity. Unlike other districts, Sai Kung produces a more significant percentage of the village and municipal solid waste (over 80% land use categorizes as villages and residentials, or complex) while preserving a similar nature on the litter-to-recycle bin pattern and ratio. In terms of the realities of the outlying island, waste is severely accumulated without proper care. Many of the tourist hotspots, including Kiu Tsui Beach, Hap Mun Beach, and Yim Tin Tsai have an obvious trace to stacked piles of glass and plastic bottles. While the villagers are unwilling to handle the leftovers on their lands, outlying islands’ systems appear to be dis-coordinated. Sai Kung therefore adapts a simultaneous nature on urban-rural polarity: urban areas favor a more democratic, rapid, and transparent system where rural areas favor a more cost-effective and vernacular approach.

Followed by above discoveries, the project approaches urban waste management at a more systematic level running under quick pace dealing with operate-fail-recovery repetition. As for the rural area, the project particularly has chosen Yim Tin Tsai (YTT) as the initial prototype for working the scaffold design as a more vernacular approach. YTT has a very unique characteristic of “act”, the landscape was purposefully redesigned, after abandonment, to educate and demonstrate such processes of a salt farm system, histories of local Catholic origins, mangroves planting as well as annual/ biannual land art events. YTT then has the best “excuse” to add in another layer of “demo” to the landscape, located on an undulating grass cover beside the salt pans, by acting itself as the centre facility for island waste management. A villager is used to deal with their own waste by refilling biodegradables back to soil or benefiting themselves with cow dung as fuels etc. Therefore it is important to have a “reward” system to motivate the villagers (from the surrounding area) to drive their boats and utilize the structure. “Rewards” interlinks to the “give and take” framework, where the amount of waste that was “given” would produce a proportional amount of electricity, heat and gas that would be linked directly back to the energy systems of the islands. While villagers have a strong purpose to visit the site regularly, tourists are welcomed to participate as well. Just as important as the visit, tourists are also required to “give”, which in terms is to use the machine (incinerator or anaerobic digester) but bringing in their own waste to the site as an entry requirement per se. Unlike values that the villagers behold, tourists have a more aimless and stress-free reality to the site and are meant to be treating the site as a “tourists spot” instead of a management facility. The polarising value of the tourist and the villagers will lead to a “crash” when the two stakeholders confront each other at the communal spaces and public plaza of the system. As much as there is a miscommunication and invisible hatred between the tourists and villagers in the islands, the system provides an opportunity for them to construct proper conversations and bonds that could strengthen the relationship in between.

KOOZ How do you envision the project developing through time? What is the ultimate objective?

BW I would imagine the project ultimately reaches failure over time especially on the urban side. Hong Kong is changing at rapid flux constantly throughout the course of years. No wonder if the proposed system would eventually be unsatisfactory to the citizens, likely due to its pace or the citizen’s partial unwillingness to participate, regardless of the proposed “reward system” as a driving force. However, what this project ultimately wants to achieve is to perform “openness” of free-wills and communication among stakeholders. The project is intentionally subject to require citizens to participate by actions and speaking. While NGOs and authorities would guide at the initial stage of waste management, it is actually left on the domain’s hands to discuss and cooperate among themselves in order to work out a proper operational system.

As for a more environmental-aware goal, I would also imagine the scaffolding structures around the rural districts to be fully or partially covered up with verticular canopies, which could also be beneficial from our side as they takes up our emissioned gas during incinerations and anaerobic digestion activities.

KOOZ How does the project approach the role of the architect within our contemporary society?

BW There are many discussions in history regarding “architecture without architects”, but it is more than true within our contemporary society. If architects were only spontaneously positioned themselves at a high point, the idea of intellectual built design will never lead to a community-based beneficial or engaging work of art. This project addressed the importance of collective design with the architect as the leading guidance that helps push the project forward.

KOOZ What is the power of the Architectural Imaginary?

BW I would say that this unbuilt imaginary could be a driving force in solving many issues around the city. As global cities are to transcend beyond merely democratic neoliberalism, rigid regimes need to be opening up their minds by allowing more public participation during policymaking and city planning processes in order to feed up the needs of their own city.