For years, a flat sat empty on the top floor of Chungking Mansions, in Tsim Sha Tsui, slowly deteriorating with each passing rainstorm and typhoon. Chinese-American architect Juan Du remembers the first time she saw the place with her colleague Natasza Minasiewicz.
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“It was mould-infested. There was water dripping into buckets all over the floor. There were electrical wires dangling,” says Du. “So I turned around to Natasza and said, ‘This is fantastic.’”
If that was an unusual reaction, it’s because Du and Minasiewicz have been working for years to convert vacant spaces in convenient locations into housing and community facilities for marginalised people.
The walls in the counselling room at the Diversity Hub are clad in wood panelling to create a calm atmosphere. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
Today, the once-neglected, 550 sq ft, three-bedroom flat on the 17th floor of Chungking Mansions has been transformed into a multifunctional space run by Christian Action, a charity that has served the vulnerable in Hong Kong for nearly 40 years. Known as the Diversity Hub, it serves ethnic minorities and is adjacent to Christian Action Centre for Refugees, which offers humanitarian assistance, social services and a welcoming space for Hong Kong’s estimated 15,000 asylum seekers, mostly from South and Southeast Asia and Africa.
The centre’s ambition has long outstripped its physical space. Asylum seekers who find themselves in Chungking Mansions – a whirring hive of shops, guest houses and flats labelled by Chinese University anthropologist Gordon Mathews as “the ghetto at the centre of the world” – squeeze into the building’s tiny lifts to make their way up for everything from hot food to language lessons and music sessions inside a warren of small rooms spread between the top and penultimate levels.
The Diversity Hub on the 17th floor of Chungking Mansions is a multifunctional space run by Christian Action. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
“One day we came for a meeting and there were so many people crammed in,” recalls Du, a professor and dean of the Architecture, Landscape and Design faculty at the University of Toronto, and honorary professor at the University of Hong Kong. “There was a choir, there was an art class. They said, ‘We just don’t have enough space.’”
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Du and Minasiewicz, a Polish architect and researcher, learned of the Centre for Refugees’ space crunch after they transformed an empty building in Jordan into an emergency housing and community centre in 2022.
