The series Portraits from Above, Hong Kong's Rooftop Informal Communities (2008) by Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham analyses a unique trait in the urban planning of Hong Kong, a city that became one of capitalism's locomotives in Asia under British colonialist rule. During the last half-century, the immigrants arriving from mainland China in the wake of the cycles of political upheaval in the country, together with those from southeast Asian countries, hard-pressed as they were by the need for cheap housing in the city's metropolitan areas where there was demand for labor, have built illegal houses on the rooftops of degraded highrises in the city. These dwellings where some live for decades, are built under the State's blind eye. Some are made of cement and bricks and have water supply, drainage and electricity or even amenities such as internet connection and others are shanties of sheet metal, wood and other makeshift materials. They often form labyrinthine complexes, an incongruous assemblage of volumes and materials crowning the building's top.

Wu and Canham record this, invisible from street level, aspect of the city's cultural and architectural history. Choosing five buildings that were included to an urban reformation plan, they enter twenty such housetops and weave a documentary that includes fragments of interviews with the tenants, general-view photographs of the buildings as well as inside views of the dwellings, architectural plans comparing the initial form of the building to the rooftop's condition today, precise perspective plans and floor plans of the housetops. The texts are testimonies to the personal experience; the photographs enter the rooftops into the city's architectural horizon and constitute a valuable record for the housetops' internal life; the drawing outlines their historical evolution and their deeper structure. Out of this composite documentary an unknown world emerges, balancing between hope and despair, constantly devising solutions for survival under the threat of the law, a hand-made and improvised world in full counterpoint to the austere, elegant form of its surrounding skyscrapers that spear imperiously at the sky.

References were drawn from the essay Rooftop Housing in Hong Kong, by Ernest Chui.

Rufina Wu was born in Hong Kong in 1980. She studied at the University of Waterloo in Canada where she completed degrees in Environmental Studies and Architecture. Her research interests focus on informal housing practices associated with rapid urban development and population mobility. She lives and works in Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Toronto. Stefan Canham was born in England in 1968. He studied Film in Hamburg, Germany, and has been working on documentary photo and television projects since 1995. His interests focus on the usage of urban space, in particular on marginalized communities and forms of self-housing. His photographic record of the nomadic squatter culture in Germany was published in 2006 under the title Bauwagen / Mobile Squatters. He lives and works in Hamburg. From December 2007 to February 2008, Wu and Canham collaborated on the series Portraits from Above, Hong Kong's Rooftop Informal Communities, which won the 5th International Bauhaus Award 2008 (3rd Prize). This work was published by Peperoni Books on 2009 and is a travelling exhibition that will be shown in Hong Kong (September 2009) and Canada (January 2010).