Memory Community

Introduction

Memory Community A Memory Factory for Living Community based on Abandoned Factories

Advisor: Yang Zhenjing

Teammate of Original Project: Yang Han

Individual Design Development based on Collaborative Studio Work with Yang Han

95% Individual Idea and Drawing

2019 Spring, Chongqing

Content

“Invented Tradition is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”

Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1992

“Community is Imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community, 1991

[1] Community Production Mechanism - Deconstruct the Replacement of Public Community in China

Based on the community theory of Anderson, the imagined community is not a type of community, but a cognitive process to perceive the existence of the whole community. The process is stimulated by repetitive self-organized activities and traditions, and it is also a part of the community production. Without related process, community may not be built or formed successfully.

When we try to use the community production theories to understand status quo of nowadays physical public community in Chinese cities, we could find that real estate is the most common and modern community built with strict capital interference and calculation, which finally makes it fail to be a good living community. Generally, the real estate will not care about whether residents in the real estate living community do have the same spontaneous behaviors, interests or traditions with other residents or not, based on their business benefits. On the other side, residents also don’t have the right to choose their ideal neighbors. Moreover, out of economic thoughts, real estate is always designed to be a block with lots of compact living units without large public living space and open boundary to other street blocks. All these factors lead to the lack of self-organized activities and traditions in most real estate living communities in China.

Internet community is replacing the living community to serve as a public sphere, as the real estate living communities are not built successfully. Although with some limitation to the global internet, the internet community and several domestic social media provide open platforms for citizens to have spontaneous discussion and invent internet-based traditions for their online community. The internet community is also one with commercial mechanism, which is not a system with strict capital control and interference, making netizens have better chances to generate repetitive activities and traditions and finally build a community.

[2] Memory Factory as a kind of Medium - Reconstruct Physical Community through Community Imagination Construction

This project explores to reconstruct the local physical community based on the imagined community theory. Through the community imagination construction, physical community is expected to be built within a series of mechanical processes. Each mechanical process in the imagination construction is based on Production, Transportation, Exchange and Storage of citizens’ individual memory.