Narrating the Mall City

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Between Typologies and Representation: The Tong Lau and the Discourse of the "Chinese House" in Colonial Hong Kong

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Spectacular Macau: Visioning Futures for a World Heritage City

This paper examines the conflicting sentiments generated by Macau’s recent developments and how these dynamics have helped galvanize particular visions amongst Macau’s residents holding different possessive relationships to the city. More specifically, it explores these processes through the simultaneous construction of two incongruent landscapes: a fantasyland of gaming and leisure propelled by the liberalization of the casino industry, and a ‘historic city of culture’ exemplified by Macau’s newly acquired UNESCO World Heritage City status. Building on Debord’s conception of the dialectic of the spectacle, this paper illustrates how the growing support for heritage conservation in Macau has been propelled by a shared anxiety over the phenomenal changes brought by an expanding casino industry and concomitant erosion of Macau’s cultural identity. Through extensive interviews with local architects, conservation experts and activists, I elucidate how the designation of Macau as a World Heritage City has helped consolidate particular sets of moral claims around heritage and culture as well as introduced new commodifications of the environment that cannot be easily delinked from other spaces of the ‘spectacle city.’postprin

Shanzheng (善政) and gongde (公德): moral regulation and narratives of ‘good government’ in colonial Hong Kong

While ‘good government’ has long been hailed as a defining feature of colonial Hong Kong, this paper argues that it should be seen as an epistemological ordering frame whose existence relied upon constant processes of moralization undertaken by many actors across multiple scales. Central to this was the invocation of certain ways of thinking about the roles of government and citizens implicit in Chinese historical experience. These moral constructs, transplanted and transformed within the colonial milieu, became central elements in the way many British officials and Chinese residents came to express themselves, and by doing so constituted themselves as governing subjects upholding colonial rule. To explore the role of these constructs in particular situated practices and broader strategies of colonial governance, this paper focuses on two case studies concerning the improvement of public health amidst growing threats of epidemics between 1900 and 1908. Although these efforts were not successful in containing the spread of diseases, the emphasis on self-help and revival of ‘local traditions’ for encouraging people to improve their neighborhoods helped engender a sense of pride and solidarity amongst the Chinese residents and propagated the idea that Hong Kong was an orderly, ‘civilized’ Chinese society superior to that of mainland China itself. Although both case studies are drawn from particular sites, it is clear that the initiation, implementation and effects of the projects were not confined to the local scale, but were tied to larger shifts in the forms of governance and emerging political discourses beyond Hong Kong. They thus highlight the ‘networks of multiple scales’ and the translocal processes through which competing conceptions of Hong Kong and its relations to the world were actively being constructed by different actors under colonial rule.postprin

Afterword

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Aspects Of Urbanization In China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou

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Review: Non West modernist past: on architecture and modernities (Book Review)

Book review of Non West modernist past : on architecture & modernities, edited by William S.W. Lim & Jiat-Hwee Chang. Singapore : World Scientific Pub., 2012postprin

Combating Nuisance: Sanitation, Regulation, and the Politics of Property in Colonial Hong Kong

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Constructing a New Domestic Discourse: The Modern Home in Architectural Journals and Mass-market Texts in Early Twentieth Century China

This paper explores how changing ideals of the modern home were articulated in China’s architectural journals and mass market texts during the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which many Chinese cities experienced increasing housing shortages for the working poor along with changing expectations of ‘contemporary’ dwellings for middle income urbanites. More specifically, I examine how the design of residential houses and domestic arrangements became a subject of intellectual and political concern for architects and cultural intermediaries. By tracing the competing moral claims ascribed to the modern home through these writings, I illustrate their shifting assumptions about the ‘social role’ of architecture in the Chinese context. I argue that while these critiques were closely related to those in Europe and elsewhere, they were specific responses to accelerating capitalist urbanization in China and were undergirded by a shared anxiety among Chinese elites and professional experts to institute an authentic modern design culture. Central to their efforts was the belief that well designed dwellings would not only help to improve the lives of Chinese citizens, but also transform their everyday day habits and develop China into a more ‘civilized,’ healthy and productive nation. While modern architecture was promoted by architects as a key means to modernization and social betterment, they debated over the suitability and appropriateness of forms, aesthetics and domestic arrangements for the Chinese populous, often selectively linking particular designs with (progressive) values that defined modernism in Western contexts as well as those associated with ‘Chinese culture and tradition.’ Meanwhile, these expressions were utilized by those in building trades to encourage consumption for the home by projecting imaginaries of modern domestic life that did not always correspond with those of intellectual elites. These explorations, which build on expanding scholarship on modern architectural history in China, will contribute to a fuller understanding of the contradictory perspectives of architecture and domesticity in an unsettling period characterized by simmering social discontent and emerging nationalism. The attention to lesser known – and arguably collectively important – figures in this study will elucidate the multifarious exchange of knowledge between different factions of architects and institutions beyond the familiar ones represented in existing historiography. Finally, the illustration of concerted attention to the problem of the home in this period will underscore the significance of domesticity in the construction of architectural discourse, which is an aspect that has been largely eschewed in the writings of modern architectural history