To sociologist Ruby Lai, Hong Kong’s notorious subdivided flats are more nuanced than they are perceived to be.
These partitioned units, with a median floor area of 118.4 square feet (11 square metres), are home to over 200,000 Hongkongers who couldn’t afford larger flats but narrowly missed the salary threshold to apply for public housing, or are in queue for them.
Media often portray subdivided flats in a negative light, seeing these living spaces as unhygienic and unfitting to raise children.
Believing there’s more to the story, Lai – an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at Lingnan University – decided to examine how the residents live in these spaces.
Lai and her research partners spent two years doing intensive fieldwork in Kwai Chung, Tai Kok Tsui and Kwun Tong. Their research findings were later turned into an art exhibition in one of the districts.
During the fieldwork, Lai and other researchers hung out with 60 families in subdivided units, interviewing them, documenting their daily lives and recording soundscapes like a resident’s heartbeats or noises in an industrial building.
Lai asked the residents two questions: What objects are essential to living in a subdivided unit? What object do you retain by your side, despite constantly having to move between flats?
The answers they gave her varied: a toothpick, a dictionary, a ceramic urn containing the ashes of a beloved pet, and children’s drawings.
A boy said his favourite corner was the upper bunk of his bunk bed, carefully decorated with cherished toys and books placed on a wooden platform built by his godfather.
The sociologist said she was particularly impressed by how mums maximised the space of their tiny flats. For example, a mother of two toddlers put a mattress on the floor of her subdivided flat and turned it into a multifunctional space for sleeping, having meals, and playing.
These intangible, obscure and seemingly mundane details are often overlooked in the discussion on Hong Kong’s entrenched housing problems, the sociologist pointed out.
Her research also found that subdivided housing tenants came from diverse backgrounds, ranging from single people to families with children, from the working class to the middle class.
“There is an assumption that only the poor live in subdivided flats, but housing precarity and unaffordable housing are problems faced by most people,” Lai said.
From proliferation to regulation
Since 2000, subdivided units, bedspace and “coffin home” apartments gradually proliferated in Hong Kong as a result of limited land, high demand and increasingly unaffordable housing.
The city had around 108,200 subdivided flats in 2021, according to official data. The Society for Community Organization (SoCO), a local NGO serving low-income residents, estimates that nearly 250,000 people live in these cramped units.
Since December, the minimum standards of living conditions for subdivided units have undergone public consultation to be defined, legitimised and regulated.
In his 2024 policy address, Chief Executive John Lee said Hong Kong would pass a law requiring subdivided flats – to be named “basic housing units” – should measure at least 8 square metres (86 square feet) in floor space, and should have windows and an individual toilet. The rule, however, will not affect bedspace and “coffin home” apartments.
The government’s policy will impact the well-being of residents, Lai said. “When subdivided units could potentially be as small as 8 square metres, it directly affects how a space is structured, arranged, how many objects can be kept in a flat, the subdivisions and safety regulations.”
Lai acknowledges that subdivided units offer inadequate living spaces. However, as Hong Kong is rethinking its housing policy, she calls for the importance to see how residents put a lot of thought into transforming these “highly constrained, precarious” units into resilient, functional and liveable abodes for themselves and their families.
Collaborative exhibition
Lai has turned her research findings into an exhibition called “Listening to the Stories of 118.4 Square Feet,” currently open for the public in Kwai Chung.
The academic collaborated with artists Miu Law and Victor Sham to create an interdisciplinary exhibit to highlight the real-life stories of people living in subdivided flats.
The creative art project involves not only tenants Lai interviewed, but also social workers and other subdivided-unit tenants in the neighbourhood.
It is an experiment that Lai described as “playful, fun and meaningful.”
The exhibition features installations of everyday objects and furniture to re-create a subdivided flat, offering a glimpse into how tenants build a home in a cramped, seemingly unliveable space.
One tenant, Mandy Lau, a 36-year-old mother of two, loans one of her most treasured possessions – a wooden apple-shaped tooth box – to the exhibit. She keeps her eldest daughter’s milk teeth in the box as a keepsake – a habit she learned from her own mother.
The exhibition also offers four audio-guided tours, inviting visitors to listen to the stories of four residents in Kwai Chung.
Sham played a big role in curating the presentation of soundscapes. By installing movement sensors in nooks and crannies, visitors can interact with the exhibits as they lean into a sink to trigger the pre-recorded interview with a tenant. They can also use a stethoscope to listen to the sounds of a tenant’s heartbeat.
For Law, the exhibition could create a new experience with the tenants.
For example, they may just regard an object tucked in the bottom of the drawer as something they are reluctant to throw away, Law said. But when they see the same object in the exhibition, they may view it as “an artwork that embodies the essence of their life.”
Looking at Hong Kong’s housing problem from an artistic perspective was also a result of not wanting to throw away interesting day-to-day details discovered during fieldwork, as these findings may not be significant enough to be included in a sociological study, Lai said.
“Art and something bigger like community engagement could organically emerge from academic research,” she said. “This could be one of the impacts of scholarly work.”
Stigma of living in subdivided units
Lai also hopes the exhibition can challenge the stereotypes and stigmas of people living in subdivided units.
“There is a popular saying on local online forum LIHKG: ‘Don’t give birth to children if you live in sub-divided flats.’ But many of the tenants we spoke with actually first gave birth to children, then moved to subdivided flats,” Lai said.
Lau is one of them. She moved into a subdivided flat in Kwai Chung four years ago after giving birth to her firstborn. She now resides in a 130-square-foot with her construction worker husband and two daughters, aged 8 and 2.
Lau talked about how stigma is attached to children living in sub-divided units, with some unfairly stereotyping them as “poor” or “coarse.”
“A child’s character is moulded by the family, not by one’s living environment,” Lau said. “More room for children is certainly better, but what’s most important is that the child feels happy living together with the family.”
As subdivided units are soon to be transformed by the proposed new law, Lau felt that the regulations may be helpful to tenants whose flats have no windows, and the suggestion for an independent kitchen could be effective in preventing landlords from dividing a “so-called kitchen” the size of an electric stove, which is too cramped for cooking.
But Lau worries that the upcoming law could result in landlords splitting larger subdivided flats into smaller ones, as little as 80 square feet – the minimum size under the proposed law, or give landlords a reason to increase their rent or utility fees.
“With existing financial pressures coupled with rental subsidies no longer being offered, it will be even more difficult,” Lau said.
- Exhibition: Listening to the Stories of 118.4 Square Feet (free admission).
- Dates: 1 – 16 February 2025.
- Opening Hours: 11:00 am – 6:00 pm (Closed on Mondays).
- Venue: Common Lab, Bank Building, 47 G/F, Tai Loong Street, Kwai Chung, New Territories.
