Sports Courts Connec​ting… Community Engagement and Design Work of Sports Courts for Sha Tin, Yuen Long, Wan Chai, APO, LCSD, Hong Kong

Sports Courts Connecting… is a pilot public-space project that reconsiders the role of neighbourhood sports courts in Hong Kong. Rather than treating the court as a place for play alone, AaaM understands it as one of the city’s most open and repeatedly used civic spaces—a place for sport, but also for waiting, spectating, resting, crossing through, gathering, and everyday encounter. The project therefore asks not simply how to “beautify a court,” but how to reveal its wider value as part of daily public life.

The project began with pre-design engagement, combining surveys, site observation, and contextual reading to understand how each court already functioned within its district ecology. AaaM was interested not only in preferences for colours or facilities, but in how these places were used, remembered, described, and emotionally anchored in neighbourhood life. Graphic design was therefore treated not as decoration, but as a spatial medium—one that could shape atmosphere, recognition, movement, behaviour, and place memory, bringing cultural meaning into everyday recreational infrastructure.

Wan Chai, Yuen Long, and Sha Tin were not approached through one generic visual language. Each site required its own curatorial response. In Wan Chai, the stone wall became an identity anchor, while the four-point line introduced a playful extension to the game and new forms of public conversation. In Yuen Long, the intervention responded to stepped levels, shaded edges, and social life around the court, framing the site as a layered communal platform. In Sha Tin, the design took a quieter approach, working with the village-edge threshold, the long bench, and the everyday passing-through rhythm to subtly reshape atmosphere and recognition. Different in form, all three sites tested the same proposition: can cultural content coexist with practical use and quietly deepen public meaning?

The significance of Sports Courts Connecting… lies not only in three completed courts, but in the methodology it establishes. Beginning with participation and site reading, translated through design, and returned to lived reality through surveys, interviews, and behavioural observation, the project evaluates whether intervention has changed how the place is used, perceived, and described. For AaaM, this is more than a court redesign project. It is a prototype that connects architecture, graphic design, participation, curation, and social research—showing how even the most ordinary forms of urban infrastructure can become places where community identity is made visible, shared, and remembered.