Community Plant Library (San Po Kong Series) | Hong Kong

Community Plant Library (San Po Kong Series)

  • Category: Placemaking, Design Thinking & Engagement, Social Innovation

    Type: Outdoor | Workshop | Social Media

    Location: Kai Tak & San Po Kong, Hong Kong

    Completion: 2021

The “In Time Of” programme, launched by Nan Fung Group, is a community initiative that engages society through sustainable development, social design, and culture and arts.

Held over April and May 2021, Community Plant Library is conceived by “In Time Of” and onebite as a collaborative platform to introduce native plants in Hong Kong. By collaborating with nearly 20 local shops in San Po Kong, a neighbourhood known for light industries and traditional retail shops, the library hoped to display, gather, and introduce plants to reinvigorate the community, and to discover the social and cultural value of a plant in urban context by using plants to initiate conversations and collect interesting information about the community network. The Community Plant Library encourages local residents to walk around and get to know their community, offering the opportunity for fresh encounters and interactions in public spaces among plant lovers.

In the first part of the programme, onebite worked with 30 partner shops, ranging from snacks shops, herbal tea shops, and eateries to co-design and adopt “plant furniture”, using the power of flora and fauna to transform the look and mood of their interior spaces. The furniture was made with discarded wood materials gathered by Coutou Woodworking Studio from Nan Fung Group’s construction site. Based on a few prototypes, onebite and Coutou then customised the plant furniture based on requirements gathered from partner shops, making the design process to design a dual functional plant rack collaborative and insightful in understanding users’ needs. 

  • The second part invited the community to visit these partner shops, where plants are displayed for locals to adopt and to have a conversation. Some residents would eventually become members of our Plant Lover team, where they would run day-to-day operations of the library, which includes chatting with locals, maintaining the plants, and facilitating craft workshops such as plant dyeing, upcycling coffee grounds to make planting pots, and making ginger powder.

    As part of the Roving Plant Clinic, a plant doctor or plant therapist would roam around San Po Kong and Kai Tak area, stopping at designated locations to answer residents’ and shop owners’ questions about plants and help them diagnose problems with their plants. Quite often, wherever the plant doctor stopped, a group would gather naturally to chat and share stories about their plants.

    Community Plant Library may not have offered books, but it offers the same lofty goals and familiar warmth a library has. It wants to gather and share the collective knowledge and collaborative action of partner shops and residents, accumulated in regularly updated community plant map. It also hopes to create cosy spaces activated by the plant furniture, which over time would organically become nodes for residents to drop in and meet before grocery shopping.

    Community cohesion and social resilience are built up accumulatively through small actions and simple greetings every day, made possible by humble looking plants.

From Social to Eco-Living

  • The process to onboard partner shops to join the Community Plant Library programme offered pertinent lessons in placemaking and community engagement. Through overcoming obstacles, onebite learnt valuable lessons that improved our skills as community designers.

    The first obstacle our designers encountered was the entrenched mentality amongst shop owners and residents that only experts generate placemaking ideas and the community are merely silent beneficiaries. Quite the opposite, through this project, onebite hopes to encourage residents to generate more ideas, initiate more actions, and take the lead more actively through co-creation. We believe stakeholders have the insight and power to create spaces that are balanced and sustainable. Participants may even become collaborators in the process, such as our Plant Librarians.

    The second obstacle was how to encourage partner shops to join this programme. Initially, many were skeptical and fearful when the team of designers approached potential shop owners to offer “free” potted plants. Often it took several visits and conversations to build up trust and broach the details of the Community Plant Library. Placing the plants in the shops is only the first step. Designers also had to find ways to encourage and remind the shop owners to water the plants. A creative solution is to incorporate a name tag with the plant, getting the owners involved in naming their plants in the hope they would be cared for their owners’ own children. For example, one shop owner named her two potted plants after her grandchildren. This not only reminded her whenever the grandchildren are not around in the shop. Whenever they are, they would also volunteer to water and take care of their own namesake plants!

    Design for Good Values

    • Positive Impact

    • Build Shared Value

    ESG/ Sustainability Factors

    • Community
      - Civic Engagement & Giving

    • Customers
      - Health & Wellness
      - Impact Improvement

    • Monocle Design Award 2024.

    • Good Design Award 2023

  • Sponsor: Nan Fung Group

    Collaborators:     Coutou Woodworking Studio, Eco-Greenergy

    Local Shop Collaborators: 盈新電訊-電話零件店, 信發電業有限公司, 涼茶舖濼生堂, 泰串, 星salon, 永定堂, 蔡榮發食品批發, 多麵館, 小春日和, 輕食 茶坊, Wanna Eat, 友利坊, 富源街1號, 菓林店, 雲南人家, 窩子, 泰船麵

    Photographer: Tai Ngai Lung

    One Biters: Alan Cheung, Carmen Kwok, Chloe Cheung, Daisy Ng, Melody Siu, Sarah Mui

  • #communityplantlibrary #rovingplantclinic #neighbourhood #resilientcity