Impact of layout design on neighborly interaction in public housing estate, Hong Kong

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tapan Kumar Dhar
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Layout Design ◽  
Housing Estate ◽  
Public Housing Estate

Temporalities, a Disability Chronotope, and Empathetic Horizons in Still Human

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Alex Cockain
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Housing Estate ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Public Housing Estate

The article engages with arrangements of time and space and how they conjoin to constitute a disability chronotope that combines with other textual elements to both expand and limit empathetic horizons in Still Human, a film about a physically impaired middle-aged man and his Pilipino foreign domestic helper (FDH), set largely within a Hong Kong public housing estate. The study distinguishes between the text’s declarative and descriptive layers, albeit while recognizing the forced and perhaps violent nature of this division. Structuring the surface of the film are technical codes and a chronological, optimistic, and sometimes humorous overcoming narrative through which protagonists triumph over tragedy. However, the surface of the text is intermittently disturbed by descriptive layers, or figurative currents. Although this troubling content appears peripheral to, and on the margins of, the text, this underlying and seemingly extraneous content is a crucial supplement which may more effectively realize authorial intentions to disclose the protagonists’ humanness and engender empathy than the more prominent technical codes that structure the text’s surface. Such coexisting layers illustrate how texts are stratified and how the content of texts and the intentions of authors are haunted by undecidability.

Empowerment and the individualisation of resistance: A Foucauldian perspective on Theatre of the Oppressed

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-349
Author(s):  
Laura Wynne
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Third Sector ◽  
Theatre Of The Oppressed ◽  
Housing Estate ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
The Third ◽  
Public Housing Estate ◽  
Mixed Community ◽  
Sydney Australia

Waterloo, in Sydney, Australia, is a neighbourhood currently dominated by a large public housing estate. The estate is to be redeveloped to be a ‘socially mixed’ community largely comprised of private residents. Many current residents of Waterloo have organised in opposition to the redevelopment. At the same time, government and community development agencies have implemented a number of capacity building and consultation programmes for residents, including a theatre performance. Programmes of empowerment are increasingly used by the state and the third sector to encourage disadvantaged or marginalised citizens to ‘take responsibility’ for their own lives. In this article, I examine a performance coordinated by a community theatre group that uses the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ format, intended to allow participants to identify ways to overthrow the forces that oppress them. I use a Foucauldian conception of power, subjectivity and resistance to critically examine the performance in its context. I explore ways in which the Theatre of the Oppressed format was applied (perhaps unintentionally) in such a way that it reinforced a vision of the situation as immutable and unchangeable, placing the onus on residents to transform their own actions to deliver change. Such framing makes any effort at resistance appear absurd, and is anything but empowering for residents.

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