Abstract
75.6% of land comprising Hong Kong remains undeveloped according to the special administrative region’s planning department. In turn, Hong Kong’s constricted real estate, now estimated to be the world’s costliest, has created eye-popping living arrangements historically and contemporarily. Denizens’ colorful reputation and imagination for flouting city ordinances, zoning laws, and spatial management stand emblematic of tenacious self-sufficiency and a free-spirited brand of runaway capitalist initiative. Why is this conspicuous trademark of Hong Kong’s societal fabric very much alive in the 21st Century? Why does this matter in a rapidly urbanizing world witnessing the ascension of mega-urban centers alongside ever-widening socioeconomic chasms? This paper intends to illuminate the peculiar origins and longevity of the Kowloon Walled City, an urban monolith of notoriety and autonomy that blossomed in a semi-legal grey zone unencumbered under British protectorate rule for nearly a century. Parallels will connect the linear trajectory between Kowloon’s hardnosed living to today’s comparable Chungking Mansions and the hundreds of thousands of cage homes appearing in all corners of the city. This paper aims to answer why these residential paradoxes continue to function with efficiency and relevancy, posing solutions for indigent housing while exacerbating the stigma of social and economic ostracism.
Highlights
Hong Kong’s 2019 summer of discontent transitioned into an autumn of pervasive, combustible rage [1]
The Hong Kong government, under the leadership of Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, threatened to legislate the extradition bill. The public viewed this action as an egregious violation of the political, social, and economic autonomy that had been granted to Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China under the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong
This paper aims to answer why Hong Kong’s residential paradoxes continue to function with efficiency and relevancy, posing solutions for indigent housing while exacerbating the stigma of social and economic ostracism
Summary
Hong Kong’s 2019 summer of discontent transitioned into an autumn of pervasive, combustible rage [1]. While Hong Kong has successfully absorbed millions of refugees and economic migrants from mainland China since the end of the Second World War and incorporated them into the post-war economic miracle that the former British Crown Colony undoubtedly represents, Davis asserts Hong Kong’s “success in rehousing squatters, tenement-dwellers, and civil war refugees in new public apartment blocks is not quite the humanitarian miracle often depicted [8] The erasure of native Chinese squatter settlements in Sai Ying Pun marked another example of the Hong Kong colonial regime doling out land to the native poor only later to subsume it, expelling perceived undesirables from precious land of which the government sought to increase the value. Always in lockstep with the evolution of Hong Kong housing, urban fires twofold extinguished and revealed sociopolitical and economic tensions within the Colony time and again
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