Light in The Crevice

“In the crevice where time and space get compressed, what else could we still get?”

Shenzhen, an iconic and highly modernized city in China, starting from a fishing village to a metropolis, spends 40 years creating this amazing “Shenzhen Speed”. In the grand narrative constructed by those rising astronomical figures of population and economy, Shenzhen becomes a screen underlining the beating number. The light constantly attracts the shimmer around and gets brighter. However, people coming from all around and living there, the shimmer lighting up this screen, all fall into oblivion.

The advanced and the backward are kind of the two sides of one city. In the shadow of tall buildings, there are those traditional and relatively backward urban villages. Shenzhen included, and this sense of separation is even stronger in this young city.

Walking there, we can see the real cyberpunk scenes. The low and dilapidated buildings, disorderly rusty pipes, and crowded dark streets show us what it looks like in the urban villages. The buildings are filled in the grid orderly, looking like a puzzle with the imperceptible crevices. All the buildings are organized together densely, you can even shake hands with the people in the opposite building, which is why they are called hand-shaking buildings. The crowded and deep structure organizes the village, narrating another kind of urban life straight.

In Shenzhen, there are 1892 urban villages, covering an area of 350k㎡ and accounting for 17.5% of the area under the jurisdiction of the city. There are 350,000 buildings in the urban villages which are in shreds and patches but accommodates 57.6% of the population.

As a rapidly developing immigrant city, these urban villages provide shelters to the people pouring in. Because of the low cost and the convenience to work, urban villages become the first choice of “Shenzhen drifters” to live in. Time and space both get compressed there. Everyone seems to live in that crevice. Crowding and darkness engrave the strokes of helplessness. Chaos and noise smear the the monotonous background. But maybe a bougainvillea beside a window needs sunshine to bloom. Maybe a kid wants to step on his shadow stretched by the sun on his way back home. Maybe some homesick person wants to see a smile facing the sun from the opposite building……

In that crevice, we probably need just one beam of light.

Urban life is separated by those dark and deep crevices. In order to keep the crevices from being dark anymore and to illuminate the life in the urban villages, we try to introduce sunlight into them, which should have been like this.

On the top roof of these “hand-shaking” buildings, we use these two reflectors. One is flexible and could be adjusted with the sun’s height angle. And the other is a fixed reflector to reflect the sunlight downward, entering the solar light pipe which is our measure that applicated to diffusing the sunlight outward. So the surrounding would be brighter then before.

We also set multiple solar panels on the roof that can store solar energy during the day and convert it into light energy at night to illuminate these alleys through the solar light pipe.

Through these measures, we can see a bright prospects.