This project focuses on the public housing complexes located across Chiba, carefully decoding their historical contexts and the current lives of residents through fieldwork. Repeated research has revealed that such housing complexes have always been spatially interlinked with labor and gatherings.

Some sixty years ago, during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth, the bay area was transformed into an industrial zone through large-scale land reclamation, next to which housing complexes were built. Workers from all over the country moved in, bringing the festival cultures from their hometowns to the newly formed communities, which then developed their own unique festival culture passed down from generation to generation at the housing complexes. While these festivals may seem like a mishmash, they also serve as records of residents coming together to put down roots in a new place.

However, the people who have lived in the complexes since that time are now elderly and many have found it difficult to go out since the COVID-19 pandemic. Arriving to replace the retiring labor force, a number of foreigners also live in the complexes today and work in nearby industrial parks. Some are students who attend Japanese language schools while working part-time; others are university exchange students. But most are workers who spend much of their time at their jobs.

Due to these population shifts, elderly people currently make up about 40 percent of the residents in the housing complexes, and foreign-born residents account for 15 percent. These ratios suggest that the housing complexes are microcosms of a future Japan.

In this project, interviews are conducted with foreign workers living in the housing complexes and with elderly people who have lived there for many years. Their words and physical memories serve as clues to guide the design and creation of the structure. The completed structure will be installed in the plaza of a housing complex for a performance in which residents help pull, raise, and topple it. It will constitute a temporary space of coexistence, emerging from a single action shared among people often separated from one another by differences of daily rhythm, language, and physical distance. And this will be a moment when the collective entity of the housing complex is reconstructed in a new form.

[Types of citizen involvement] Performance participation, Interviews