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Building Colonial Hong Kong
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation. In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nin...
The Speculative City
The Speculative City explores property speculation as a key aspect of financialization and its role in reshaping the contemporary built environment. The book offers a series of case studies that encompass a range of cities whose urban fabrics have undergone significant transformation in recent years. While the forms of these developments shared many similarities, their trajectories and social outcomes were contingent upon existing planning and policy frameworks and the historical roles assumed by the state and the private sector in housing and welfare provision. By paying close attention to the forces and actors involved in property development, this book underscores that the built environment has played an integral part in the shaping of new values and collective aspirations while facilitating the spread of financial logics in urban governance. It also shows that these dynamics represent a larger shift of politics and culture in the ongoing production of urban space and prompts reflections on future trajectories of finance-led property speculation.
The Speculative City
By attending to the divergent forces and actors involved in property development in different geopolitical contexts, The Speculative City illustrates both the novelty and historical continuity of urbanization in the twentieth-first century.
Mall City
Hong Kong is the twenty-first-century paradigmatic capital of consumerism. Of all places, it has the densest and tallest concentration of malls, reaching tens of stories. Hong Kong’s malls are also the most visited, sandwiched between subways and skyscrapers. These mall complexes have become cities in and of themselves, accommodating tens of thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure. Mall City features Hong Kong as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space has come a long way since the nineteenth-century covered passages of Paris, which once awed the bourgeoisie with glass roofs and gaslights. It has morphed from the arcade to the departm...
Place Meaning and Attachment
Revolutions have gripped many countries, leading to the destruction of buildings, places, and artifacts; climate change is threatening the ancestral homes of many, the increasingly uneven distribution of resources has made the poor vulnerable to the coercive efforts by the rich, and social uncertainty has led to the romanticizing of the past. Humanity is resilient, but we have a fundamental need for attachment to places, buildings, and objects. This edited volume will explore the different meanings and forms of place attachment and meaning based on our histories and conceptualization of material artifacts. Each chapter examines a varied relationship between a given society and the meaning fo...
Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change
In the history of planning, the design of an entire community prior to its construction is among the oldest traditions. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change explores the twenty-first-century fortunes of planned communities around the world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the editors and contributors examine what happened to planned communities after their glory days had passed and they became vulnerable to pressures of growth, change, and even decline. Beginning with Robert Owen's industrial village in Scotland and concluding with Robert Davis's neotraditional resort haven in Florida, this book documents the effort to translate optimal design into sustaining a c...
Making Hong Kong
This insightful book provides a comprehensive survey of urban development in Hong Kong since 1841. Pui-yin Ho explores the ways in which the social, economic and political environments of different eras have influenced the city's development. From colonial governance, wartime experiences, high density development and adjustments before and after 1997 through contemporary challenges, this book explores forward-looking ideas that urban planning can offer to lead the city in the future. Evaluating the relationship between town planning and social change, this book looks at how a local Hong Kong identity emerged in the face of conflict and compromise between Chinese and European cultures. In doi...
Form Follows Fever
Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. Caught in a frenzy to rebuild the city in the devastating aftermath, this book charts the complex interplay between a cast of figures, from military surveyors, naval doctors, Indian sepo...
Enclave to Urbanity
Cross-cultural relations are spatial relations. Enclave to Urbanity is the first book in English that examines how the architecture and the urban landscape of Guangzhou framed the relations between the Western mercantile and missionary communities and the city’s predominantly Chinese population. The book takes readers through three phases: the Thirteen Factories era from the eighteenth century to the 1850s; the Shamian enclave up to the early twentieth century; and the adoption of Western building techniques throughout the city as its architecture modernized in the early Republic. The discussion of architecture goes beyond stylistic trends to embrace the history of shared and disputed spac...
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History offers a comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge report on recent developments in architectural production and research. Divided into three parts – Practices, Interrogations, and Innovations – this book charts diversity, criticality, and creativity in architectural interventions to meet challenges and enact changes in different parts of the world through featured exemplars and fresh theoretical orientations. The collection features 29 chapters written by leading architectural scholars and highlights the reciprocity between the historical and the contemporary, research and practice, and disciplinary and professional knowledge. Providing an essential map for navigating the complex currents of contemporary architecture, the Companion will interest students, academics, and practitioners who wish to bolster their understanding of built environments.
