This vivid book is an inquiry into the stagnation between the development of architectural practice and the progress in urban modernization. It is about islands as territories of resistance. It is about dense places where multitudes dwell in perennial contestations with the city on every front. It is about the histories, tactics and spaces of everyday survival within the hegemonic sway of global capital and unstoppable development. It is preoccupied with making visible the culture of resistance and architecture's entanglement with it. It is about urban resilience. It is about Hong Kong, where uncertainty is status quo.
This interdisciplinary volume explores real and invented places and identities that are created in tandem with Hong Kong's urban development. Mapping contested spaces in the territory, it visualizes the energies and tenacity of the people as manifest in their daily life, social and professional networks and the urban spaces in which they inhabit. Embodying the multifaceted nature of the Asian metropolis, the book utilizes a combination of archival materials, public data sources, field observations and documentation, analytical drawings, models, and maps.
Readership: Rich in historical, theoretical and visual analysis, this original monograph is essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding and interpreting urban built environments as an accumulation and contestation of spaces and territories. Students of architecture, art and design history, urban design, urban history, urban studies, geography, Asian and cultural studies, will find the methodological approaches, investigations and visualizations useful in shaping their own perspectives on the urban.
Eunice Seng is Associate Professor and Chair of the PhD program in Architecture at The University of Hong Kong; and Principal of SKEW Collaborative Shanghai-Hong Kong. An architect and architectural historian, her work explores interdisciplinary intersections and questions of agency in architecture, housing, domesticity and public space.