A Home Then, A Home Now
Abstract:
This thesis explores how Hong Kong Canadians remember, inhabit, and imagine their homes to develop a process for positioning home in relation to transnational belonging. In response to discriminatory migration and zoning policies, historic migration from Hong Kong formed built networks of belonging and agency within Canada’s cities and suburbs that have been largely overlooked by Western architectural scholarship. A Home Then, A Home Now connects the past and present homes of five people who moved from Hong Kong to Canada between 1955-1975, to identify embedded material elements, spatial preferences, and transnational routines that relate to histories of migration in the built environment. Drawing from migration scholarship and participatory methods, I worked back-and-forth with participants through a series of phone interviews to collaboratively draw their childhood homes and imagine changes to their current homes. We annotated these co-authored plan and perspective drawings with lived experiences that navigate spatial purpose, transnational networks, and Hong Kong Canadian identity. By generating spatial knowledge from unheard voices, this research records “other” histories to question dominant forms of architectural history, representation, discourse, and design. This process exemplifies how design disciplines can learn from everyday sites of diasporic memory to better record and imagine home in a rapidly globalizing world.
The examining committee is as follows:
Supervisor:
Jane
Hutton
Co-supervisor:
Anne
Bordeleau
Committee
member: Jonathan
Enns
Internal-external
reader:
Robert
Jan
van
Pelt
External:
Erica
Allen-Kim
The
defence
examination
will
take
place:
Monday,
April
11th,
2022,
10:00am
Teams
link
available
via
the graduate
student
Learn
page
or
by request.
The
committee
has
been
approved
as
authorized
by
the
Graduate
Studies
Committee.
A
copy
of
the
thesis
is
available
for
perusal
in
ARC
2106A.