Everyday life and spatial transformation: The construction of a community’s interiority in the void deck | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Themed Issue: Projected Interiorities
  • ISSN: 1477-965X
  • E-ISSN: 1758-9533

Abstract

The void deck, originally developed for housing projects in Singapore, refers to the open space located on the ground floor of a residential building. The model of the void deck was exported to Suzhou Industrial Park and later used in a growing number of high-rise residential developments in China. Taking community interiority as a new perspective, the discussion of void decks and everyday life investigates whether the void deck endows a new layer of interiority to communal life as a special type of threshold space in China’s highly dense and high-rise residential environments. The growing number of domestic objects in the void decks represents a consensual reconstruction of community interiority, allowing the reflection and rediscovery of the resonant membrane that mediates every relationship between people and things living in a substantially enclosed community. The study of void deck, its status and its transformation reflects how neo-liberal community spaces and new social relations in the communities in China have been changing: the communities are evolving from a consumption-based and top–down designed space, circling back to a deeper relationship between people and community within the urban transformation.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • XIPU Institution Soft Science (Award RDF-SP-78)
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/content/journals/10.1386/tear_00090_1
2023-04-27
2024-04-25
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