Housing has become a battle ground between use-value and exchange-value, and in Hong Kong limited land is cited as a reason for ever diminishing flat sizes, and greater and greater densities. The post-war welfare state was a brief moment where housing emerged as a socio-political tool, and the current global demolition of modernist housing estates manifests the destruction of this ideology. Choi Hung Estate is under threat of demolition, with the Hong Kong Housing Authority proposing to increase the density of the estate by 24%. Using the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical methods of ‘estrangement’, students were asked to critique the demolition-led approach to the redevelopment of public housing, and propose new ways of working with the existing context rather than demolishing it. How might we increase the housing density on Choi Hung Estate without demolition? How might we learn from Choi Hung but work with it and improve it?