Fung-Choi Shop & Yo-Yo Garden

This project reimagines the paradigm of urban renewal through integrated social and spatial practices, with a focus on spatial appropriation in the 66 Zhongnan First Road Community. By activating underutilized spaces and dissolving rigid boundaries, it liberates public areas and transforms neglected zones into vibrant, multifunctional community hubs. Simultaneously, the process restores fractured social ties and revives collective memory through sustained, participatory community engagement.

The project is positioned as a community park, aiming to create a diverse network of semi-open ("grey") spaces through an inclusive and open spatial form that blurs the boundaries between indoors and outdoors.

Drawing inspiration from the area's unique "dayuan culture", the design team centered their approach around six Magnolia grandiflora trees in the community garden. By preserving their ecological and cultural value, the garden becomes a vessel of emotional memory and a distinctive, irreplaceable symbol of local identity.

Through community-building and a multi-stakeholder approach, we use spatial renewal to reconstruct public space and revive the essence of “dayuan lifestyle” — a community that restores publicness, belonging, locality, and identity. Together with residents, the owners’ committee, designers, and local partners, we transformed an idle ground-floor dormitory into a community goods shop and attracted external businesses to join. We also revitalized an abandoned flowerbed into the vibrant Yo-Yo Garden through collective planting.

Post-renovation, the combined usable area of the shop and garden reached 300㎡. The shop’s café expects annual revenue of RMB 300,000. The project has been recognized as a 2024 Wuhan Creative Community and a co-creation pilot community. Going forward, we will continue exploring spatial and social possibilities under a local, inclusive, sustainable vision, growing alongside like-minded brand partners to bring lasting vitality to the community.