Hong Kong as “Laboratory of the Future”

Abstract

Ideas may move around the world, arrive everywhere and, eventually, have an influence on very distant places. This phenomenon, it has been said, is the essence of the ongoing processes of globalization.2 At the same time, ideas (and with this term includes any kind of immaterial entities: from specific images to general visions, from fashionable looks to criteria of quality, and from new ways of life to innovative of organization) have to be produced somewhere. There has to have been some place in which, for a complex and peculiar mixture of factors, sufficiently strong happened creating the energy for them to appear and, more important, to spread and become potentially influential on other groups of people elsewhere.3 If and when this phenomenon happens, we can say that these places are playing the role of laboratories of the future: places in which the future is, at least to some extent, anticipated. My hypothesis is that Hong Kong has all of the prerogatives to be one of these places: the highest density, the most serviceoriented economy and service-intensive society, and the longest and deepest integration of Western technologies into Chinese culture. The social, economic, and cultural of Hong Kong appears to be an environment: a very favorable habitat for new forms of i.e., for new of social, cultural, and economic organization.4 Anyone who has lived in Hong Kong for awhile has had the opportunity to observe many particular aspects of the city (from city planning to domestic life, and from ways of working to ways of eating). Many such people may object to my hypothesis, saying that it is because the physical, social, and cultural in Hong Kong is so that anything it may produce should be considered as place-specific, i.e., something that can only work in Hong Kong. In the past, this observation perhaps was correct and the assumption that it would never be possible to reproduce the Hong Kong experience elsewhere was true. As a matter of fact, it would not be easy to find other places in the world where the frantic life and work style of Hong Kong would be acceptable. But now things 1 Anthony Wong Sik-kei, ITC Telecom Asia 2000, South China Morning Post, Special report, December 12, 2000. 2 I refer here, in particular, to the ideas of Arjun Appadurai. See Arjun Appadurai, Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy in The Phantom Public Sphere, (Minneapolis: Bruce Robbins, 1993). 3 1 also have developed these ideas in another paper: Ezio Manzini and Silvia Vugliano, II locale delglobale (The local of the global), Pluriverso, N 1, (January, 2000). 4 In this context, the expression environment refers to an in which some general characteristics and/ or tendencies are pushed to the extreme (i.e., they are more evident than is the norm in other places). In the case of Hong Kong, as has been stated elsewhere, these characteristics are: density, service-orientation, cultural interaction, but also speed and acceleration in urban changes and in ways of living. For more on the Hong Kong and its 'extreme character see the special issue on Hong Kong in Domus, 839 (July/ August 2001), and Laurent Gutierrez, Ezio Manzini, and Valerie Portefaix, eds., HK Lab (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2002).