Border stories: opening Hong Kong's frontier territory

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Opening the frontier closed area: a mutual benefit zone

The New Urban Question: Urbanism beyond Neo-liberalism - the 4th Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU), Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands, 26-28 November 2009Opening the Frontier Closed Area is an on-going research and speculative project that critically addresses the future development of the Frontier Closed Area – a borderland buffer zone that was established in 1951 to control illegal migration and black-market trade from mainland China. Over time the Closed Area has evolved its own specific ecosystem becoming an anomaly in one of the most densely inhabited and fastest growing urban regions. It is a zone of immense potentials and contradictions: a radical separation between ideologies, economic and political systems, and social and cultural mores. It is a horizon of dreams and desires and a site of intense exchange. The paper will explore the regional context and massive urbanisation processes that have occurred in the Pearl River Delta over the last thirty years and present a proposition for the Closed Area that uses the Zone’s special status to create an urban strategy that is mutually beneficial to both sides of the border.published_or_final_versio

Contested Territory: the Evolving Spatial Geographies of Jian Sha Zhou Village

China’s urbanization of rural areas has allowed many people to be elevated out of rural poverty and to have alternatives to farming for their livelihood, yet political corruption, economic polarization, land fragmentation, and disputes over land rights are escalating. These themes are evident in Jian Sha Zhou, a village on the periphery of Dongguan in southern China. Jian Sha Zhou exemplifies both the robust adaptability of villages that have transformed from simple agricultural units into a variety of settlements, as well as the intrinsic problems that result from urbanization. This article explores the evolving spatial geographies of the village and the competing and contradictory forces acting upon it. It specifically addresses the way in which contestation of land rights has resulted in development stasis. Unlike the village uprising—and the government’s reaction to it—in Wukan, in Guangdong Province, which became the focus of national and international media, most contested issues remain at a local level and go unreported. The land dispute in Jian Sha Zhou is archetypal of the increasing problems associated with the urbanization of rural land. As such, it provides insights about the future development of the sites that exist across China’s rural–urban fringe.published_or_final_versio

CLOSING THE WORLD’S FACTORY

Joshua Bolchover is an urban researcher, academic and architectural designer. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, focusing on researching and designing buildings in rural China. In 2010 he exhibited Rural Urban Ecology at the Venice Biennale 2010. He has curated, designed and contributed to several international exhibitions including: Utopia Now: Opening the Closed Area, a research project on the Hong Kong and Shenzhen border at the Venice Biennale 2008; Get it Louder, a touring exhibition in China; Airspace: What Skyline does London want; Hydan; Can Buildings Curate and has exhibited at the HK-SZ Biennale. Joshua was a local curator for the Manchester-Liverpool section of Shrinking Cities between 2003 and 2005. He has collaborated with Raoul Bunschoten, Chora, researching strategic urban projects and has worked with Diller + Scofidio in New York. Joshua has previously taught architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, London Metropolitan University, Cambridge University and the Architectural Association. He was educated at Cambridge University and at the Bartlett School of Architecture. John Lin is an architect based in Hong Kong and a graduate of The Cooper Union in New York City. His experimental constructions have been published in FRAME magazine (2003) and exhibited in the Kolonihaven (Architecture Park) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen (2004) and the Venice Biennale (2008). Current projects include the design of several school buildings in China. He has taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong

'Who's got the look?' Emotional, aesthetic and sexualized labour in interactive services

This article examines sexualized work and, more particularly, how and why, at the organizational level in interactive services, employees become sexualized labour. In doing so it assesses the thin line between selling a service and selling sexuality. The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee's appearance or looks. The article argues that the current conceptualization of interactive services and sexualized work is partial and blunt; either because it does not adequately incorporate employee corporeality or because it fails to distinguish between the different forms of sexualized work. A better conceptualization is achieved by incorporating aesthetic labour into the analysis, demonstrating how it is extended to sexualized labour employees to have a particular corporate look. From this analysis it is argued that a conceptual double shift is to be needed to understand sexualised labour, firstly, from emotional to aesthetic and sexualized labour and secondly, from an employee sexuality that is sanctioned and subscribed to by management to that which management strategically prescribes