Hi, I'm Justin Liu,
an Intern Architect based in Vancouver, BC.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a diverse neighbourhood with a complex set of social issues. Decades of neglect and a shortage of suitable housing have resulted in a crisis of homelessness and public spaces being claimed by encampments, which can be described as an act of spatial agency. By adopting an alternative research methodology inspired by Indigenous storytelling, this thesis examines the story of place, people, and generations of frictional issues. Through the exploration of spatial agency at varying scales, the research aims to further question the role of the designer (or architect) as the “expert.” The outcome is a series of design interventions intended to challenge the commodified housing product by exploring housing as a series of less tangible but necessary processes.