Abstract:
The deadly milk contamination scandal in 2008 devastated Chinese local milk production, and created demands for foreign dairy products, therefore, causing excessive reliance on imported milk and milk powder in China. Speculators sought for business opportunities of milk production in other countries to satisfy the growing domestic demands. However, the fundamental problem of the lingering distrust on Chinese local milk production should be addressed internally. This thesis critically addresses the growing consumerism-oriented globalisation in China, focusing on the physical and mental disconnection between the consumers and the industrialised rural food production in Hong Kong. It is an attempt to invent a possible paradigm for the recombination of urban hyper-consumption and rural production and to reintroduce rural elements back into the city. The subversive effect of the separation between consumption and production is greatly amplified by Hong Kong’s extreme urban density and social isolation which respectively contributed to two ‘irregular phenomenon: The reliance on outsourced foreign mass production to fulfil the “supply and demand” market which slowly alienated Hong Kong from the food source. The social conflicts of cultural diversities causing fragmentation and dissonance on social values. The investigation of the new level of tension between the two traditionally opposed realms - the Urban and the Rural - focuses on the modification to existing social and mental ecologies that is triggered by environmental imperatives; a semi-rural urban urbanities with sensibility on inhabited space, foregrounding the problems concerning: The re-construction of inherent social values in the incipient recombinant ‘urban’ condition dominated by displacement and disposability. The psychological (harmony) and material (food production) comfort produced by the ‘natural’ environment. The cultural identities that are built on sensitivity and sensibilities around shared spaces. (City 3.0) Through a design-driven research process, a set of architectural design principles is developed to tackle the conflicting emergence of social, mental and environmental ecologies within urban habitats (hyper-structures) in reaction to the predominant disjoining and spectacular condition of the corporate city on the Hong Kong island waterfront. The resulting architectural response is a continuous negotiation between the urban spatial production and consumption.