At home in illegality: place-making practices in Hong Kong’s industrial buildings

Abstract

Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequalities. This study utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice to explore place-making practices in one type of illegalized housing, the residential use of industrial buildings. In contrast to studies of housing inequalities that have typically focused on marginalized communities, we found that the use of industrial buildings was adopted by educated, ‘local’ (i.e. ethnically Chinese) Hong Kongers who aspired towards socio-economic mobility. Place-making required spatial adaptations to sub-standard living environments and acclimation to routine, ongoing fears of detection from law enforcement. We argue that illegality is not necessarily an impediment to place-making, but may serve to mark the temporariness of residential spaces in industrial buildings, a temporariness that accommodates residents’ aspirational socio-economic trajectories more effectively than formal housing markets. In our study, the meaning of a place was not necessarily tied to rootedness or permanence, but rather a liminal temporality enforced by illegality.