Yipu Wang
What’s in the closet?
Chengdu is a boomtown that attracts many young people from different parts of China for their careers because of its image of inclusiveness. Therefore, Chengdu has a high proportion of LGBT young people. However, they remain an invisible and vulnerable group in China.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the increasing scale of the infection, LGBT young people have lost their only gathering places, based on my informal conversations with informants. They cannot express their sexual orientation in public space or use open space as LGBT couple. This brings them lots of pressures and depression during and after the COVID-19. How can urban landscape design mitigate this?
I proposed a socio-resilient hub that blurs the boundary between LGBT young people and other groups of young people. This is the first time in China that a site responds to LGBT young people’s demands which offers a mix-used block development that brings more diverse experiences, services, and multi-dimensional youth neighbours for LGBT young people.
