The softscaping of concretised riverbanks is a common strategy to beautify canals, improve stormwater drainage and increase biodiversity. More importantly, the placement of greenery influences how people interact with the canal, often acting as a softer boundary to bring us closer to the river. Yet, the newly-planted softscape along a stretch of Whampoa Park Connector Network has changed movement patterns and behaviours for the worse. The once convivial setting along the visually-porous railings where people used to stop by, lean on to rest, river-watch, feed the fish or converse with one another is no longer a conducive space for such delightful and accidental interactions to occur. Instead, greenery snatches away this threshold space and emphasises a physically-distanced, ‘untouchable’ and harder separation from the water. The intended softscape is now, in effect, perceived otherwise, implicitly coercing and directing people to keep moving instead. How may these convivial threshold spaces be brought back and subsequently enhanced to facilitate communal interaction and social exchange by the river? 

 

The project, in the form of an urban acupuncture, thus seeks to reactivate the threshold space via the strategic removal of certain short portions of greenery and revitalise it via the insertion of riverside pods for convivial, communal activities. These pods that occupy the revived interstitial spaces between the railing and thoroughfare present opportunities to curate meaningful experiences for the public as they traverse or cross the river. In what was once perceived as an obstacle, especially when Whampoa River bifurcates the north-eastern residential area from the south-western facilities-abundant area, the introduction of the prototype can potentially turn this into a strategic asset where the river becomes a new destination, as opposed to being viewed as merely a banal hurdle to cross or walk along.