Infrastructure of the Ordinary: The Shanzhai Trolley
Infrastructure of the Ordinary: The Shanzhai Trolley examines the entanglement of manual labour, low-tech logistics, and urban form in Huaqiangbei (HQB), Shenzhen’s globally renowned electronics market. While contemporary urban discourse often focuses on megaprojects, smart cities, and automated systems, this project turns to the ordinary infrastructures that quietly sustain high-tech environments.
Infrastructure of the Ordinary: The Shanzhai Trolley examines the entanglement of manual labour, low-tech logistics, and urban form in Huaqiangbei (HQB), Shenzhen’s globally renowned electronics market. While contemporary urban discourse often focuses on megaprojects, smart cities, and automated systems, this project turns to the ordinary infrastructures that quietly sustain high-tech environments.
Using the hand trolley as both an analytical lens and a curatorial device, the research investigates how manual logistics persist within one of the world’s most technologically advanced districts. Through ethnographic observation, interviews with delivery workers, archival research, and spatial documentation, including LiDAR scanning, mapping, and videos, the project reveals the continued centrality of manual labour to HQB’s everyday operations.
By situating HQB within longer histories of post-industrial urbanism and decentralised manufacturing, the project bridges architectural history, anthroplogy, and design research, offering a critical reflection on how contemporary cities evolve through hybrid forms of human, material, and technological intelligence.
- 2025
- Grantee: Nicolas Penna, Yanyu Sun
Nicolas Penna is an architect and researcher based in Berlin and Santiago. Trained at the Universidad de Chile and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, he has worked with Sauerbruch Hutton in Berlin, Amanda Levete Architects in London, and +arquitectos in Santiago on mixed-use, cultural, and residential projects across Europe and Latin America. His independent practice comprises private houses in Chile and various competitions. He participated in the Bauhaus Lab 2023 Concrete Antarctic: Enacting Non-Humans, a multidisciplinary research programme hosted by the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, supported by a research grant from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. The results of this programme were displayed in the exhibition Not a Penguin Pool: Echoes of More-than-Human Entanglements and were published by Spector Books. He has also worked as assistant lecturer at Universidad de Chile and studio lead at Universidad de Talca.
Yanyu Sun is a researcher and writer working across architecture, urbanism, and cultural geography. She is currently a Research Assistant at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, contributing to research on regional urbanisation and infrastructural systems in the Greater Bay Area. At CUHK, she led the establishment of Liquid Territories (liquidterritories.com), an open urban design teaching platform, and coordinated research and teaching within the CU-ASK programme, supporting studio pedagogy, fieldwork, and research on the West River in the Pearl River Delta. Trained at the University of Melbourne and the Bartlett School of Architecture, her work focuses on mobility, logistics, and the spatial politics of infrastructure across urban and regional scales. Her writing appears in Vittles, London Feeds Itself, and Offcuts.