The secret behind a British design team's bid to redevelop Southorn Playground is a Taiwanese theater designer who has Hong Kong under her skin.

For Ingrid Hu, cities are a theater of sorts. And creating urban spaces, she says, is all about capturing the elements of theater in public areas - character, drama, movement, space and time.

Theater is in the background of the Taiwan-born, Hong Kong-raised designer with a masters degree from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Hu hopes her designs for Southorn Playground will help the community ``understand itself,'' she says, because it puts people in an imaginative frame of mind, as if they were watching a drama - their drama.

``A city needs memory, people need memory, and people make cities,'' Hu said in an interview with The Standard. ``But if there's no memory, in a way, there's nothing to hold on to.''

Hong Kong seems the perfect place for an infusion of creative design and an art-minded approach to living.

Years of rapid development have succeeded in uprooting and dismantling the city's beautiful spaces. Hu says that, without these spaces, the lack of historic memory leads to displacement. People need a space in which to share their memories and use them for something productive and life-rewarding.

Space,

like theater, ``conveys something that is not material,'' she says. ``It's more about meaning.''

Hu says her focus on the dramatic impact of a temporary experience goes back to wanting to make sense of her life when she was growing up in Hong Kong, worried about exams and fitting into the city's distinct rhythms.

There were things she didn't like. As a Taiwanese-born Mandarin speaker studying in the 80s, she says she ``couldn't breathe'' in the city's fiercely Cantonese culture.

``People were not used to Mandarin speakers,'' says Hu, whose mother and father moved her from Taiwan when she was very young. She left Hong Kong at 18 to live in Canada for six years, then moved to England, where she lives now, to take up a design degree at Central Saint Martins that lists among its achievements the training of actor Pierce Brosnan and the contemporary design of London's beloved red double-deck buses.

Asked to explain the meaning of her design - which features, for example, a suspended basketball court of semi-transparent glass and resin -

Hu says the exercise at this point is more about drawing out the wide range of opinions of the people who will ultimately be enjoying themselves there.

But are people really going to find this out on a floating basketball court? ``I want to believe yes, why not?'' Hu says. ``It's a point of discussion from now on, and to me that's more important than anything else, to see how people react. It doesn't matter if it gets built or not, I'm more interested in what people think.''

Hu believes creating a new urban space in Wan Chai will give residents time and space that will allow them to be more human.

Three weeks ago, she was working on her designs and going about her daily life in a city that experienced its first suicide bombing attacks.

The Thomas Heatherwick Studio where Hu works is a brisk walk from King's Cross station, which suffered the worst of the ``7/7'' suicide bombings. A man named Nicolas Thioulouse told Time magazine of his experience that day: ``Our first reaction besides checking casualties and being in shock was looking at ourselves and trying to understand... I never felt so unpowerful in my life.''

Terrorism does that. But so, too, can a daily life that relentlessly pushes its citizens to pragmatism, says Hu.

Regeneration through art, she says, can happen in the most unlikely of places.

``What is the point of my existence?'' she says. ``I would like to know that, and I would like other people to know. I don't mean to change their lives or anything, it's just awareness. After all, if you think about `I'm Chinese and you're American,' it doesn't help anyone. And for me, it's human beings, isn't it?''douglas.crets@singtaonewscorp.com