In Hong Kong, about half of the population lives in the government built public rental housing or subsidized flats. Government built housing is not strange to everyone and it really shaped our city fabric. In some way, it is the most efficient way to solve the scarcity of land resources in small Hong Kong but the drawback of monotonous design and averaged quality of spaces has nevertheless casted a big impact on our daily life. Being the most congested city of the world, Hong Kong people cannot get a fresh air within the tiny spaces, which is greatly responsible by the housing policy.
Architecturally, public sector housing is no way interesting due to the standard module design regardless of the site context. The quality of living space, communal area and open space was considered to be incoherent with the social need. The high mass of building blocks not only shielded away the fresh air and sunlight which should had been reached the ground level, but also diminished the wish of residents to enjoy the communal space and thus the chance to build up a good neighbourhood network. In return, it does create some social problem. I doubted that for the same budget, government housing project could do better and the architect can still have the chance to manipulate their creative idea to solve the affordable housing problem.