Exploring topics of urban overcrowding, housing shortage and Hong Kong’s urban spatial experience as a microcosm of extreme social disparity.
As 21st century cities have sprawled outward, with their spiralling behemoth ring-roads and expanses of suburbia, Hong Kong has instead expanded more deeply and densely into and unto itself – continuously cutting and creating more and more spaces out of its complex, congested urban fabric. The Greater Hong Kong and Shenzhen region, like nowhere else in the world, is where the global supply chains and systems of power are condensed into one metropolitan experience, from Guangzhou factories that supply the world’s consumer goods to the dominating international financial institutions that dictate global markets.
As the world’s systems and structures become more volatile and complex, so too does Hong Kong. And so too does the resulting urban fabric of the city as it continues to expand into itself; its pockets of hyper-locality, the superimposition and segregation of contrasting cultural worlds, the widening extremities of the social classes, the mounting influence of Chinese empire encroaching on spaces of Hong Kongnese identity.
Examining the delineation between public and private space in the context of Hong Kong’s urban experience, and the sociological and spatial narratives it tells us.
In its theoretically Platonic Western concept, the demarcation between public and private arenas can be more challenging to define in Chinese culture. In Hong Kong, the line between public and private moves in interesting ways to accommodate the issues, intricacies and diversity of its socio-political fabric.
With the majority of public spaces owned by private developers, many have a longstanding history of being mismanaged, made inaccessible or discouraged for actual public use. Lack of recognition of which spaces are open to the public is such an integral issue that the Hong Kong Public Space Initiative created a directory. In this context and in such a densely packed city, the relationship people of Hong Kong have with public space is sensitive and elevated. How has it shaped their notions of personal space, the public vs. the private arena, and thusly: the public vs. the private self?
The quintessentially Hong Kong experience of the “maids’ day off” illustrates that blurred and complicated line – a weekly congregation of thousands of migrant domestic workers in the elevated walkways and open plazas of the heart of the city.
