Weiyin Ma

Pop-up Home is a design research and project in search of a new spatial production of home - a new housing typology in other words - of which the hypothesis is initially placed in the contemporary world cities (Massey, 2007) where both a growing social mobility and cultural diversity are seen and thus a shifting social definition of home for its inhabitants.

The research is aimed to discover and visualise an underestimated spatial agency (Till, Schneider, and Tatjana, 2011) embedded in an urban nomad (Gestalten & ­Michelle Galindo, 2015; Braidotti, 2012; Deleuze & Guattari, 1986) as a creative user (Hill) - by which it means an emerging anthropology who itinerates in these world cities without possessing a conventional settlement of a house or shaping their lifestyles around their biological families, nationalities or other preoccupied identities, instead, tending to find and/or make their own home through each’ individually encountered and/or chosen intimacy (Illouz, 2013 & 1997; Turkle, 2013; Jamieson, 2012). The objectives of the research are to re-examine the existing housing typologies under this particular social conditioning and, through the lens of the neoliberal, to explore this spatial agency with this demographic of an urban nomad, so as to find a potentially new housing typology to cope with this shifting social definition of home; and the design of this new Home, it might more likely associate with interdisciplinary design concepts such as by-service, indeterminacy, chance (Manolopoulou), and share-economy, and less likely tether to the physically-built - be it domestic or public in their original intentions, or building-anew - rather, rely more on the distribution of domesticity into them.

The projects of the research are aimed to illustrate an ideal version of this new housing typology - a hypothetical design, Pop-up Home - to amplify the emerging evidences of some new forms of dwelling in certain contemporary world cities such as Hong Kong, London, and Pune, and as well, to speculate them into a prosperity for more future world cities, through the means of architectural-writing (Rendell, 2003) and filmmaking. With its outcomes, in particular the illustration and simulation of the yet-to-consolidate neoliberal and, spatial device - Pop-up - in both its socio-economical and socio-technical terms, the research is aimed to communicate with a wider and more interdisciplinary audience in order to inspire a better change for the future concerning some social issues in a world city - especially the perhaps mis-identified “housing crisis” (Engels, 1872).