“Tree” of “My home”: Fostering Emotional Connections for Marginalized Groups in Big City

Shenzhen's urban villages, characterized by dense construction and chaotic environments, serve as both scars and refuges amid the city's rapid development. While these areas often symbolize urban challenges, their affordable rents provide essential housing for newcomers, including young people like me.
This proposal aims to use a single tree within the urban village as a medium for community connection. By extracting images and emotions shared by residents on public platforms such as Weibo, these sentiments will be visualized using colored lights designed and installed on the tree. This illumination will transform the tree into a communal beacon, transmitting emotions to residents in the public space. Through this initiative, emotional connections among individuals are expected to be fostered, allowing everyone in the community to feel linked through shared experiences.
In this way, the project provides mental support to marginalized individuals who are integral to the city's vitality. Ultimately, the goal is to change how people perceive their emotional connections to the physical world, thereby influencing their feelings about their environment.