Making Hong Kong Home: Economic Take-off, Private-Sector Homeownership, and Accommodating Middle Class Aspirations since the 1970s

Professor Wong, John Dick On   (Principal Investigator (PI))

18

2024-01-01

476100

Making Hong Kong Home: Economic Take-off, Private-Sector Homeownership, and Accommodating Middle Class Aspirations since the 1970s

housing, political economy, middle class, circulation, ideology

History

Humanities & Social Sciences (H)

37000023

Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme (HSSPFS) 2023/24

2023

On-going

1. To re-conceptualize mass homeownership in Hong Kong as a coherent programme that policymakers and business enterprises orchestrated and coordinated, which the increasingly affluent Hongkongers embraced as they developed a sense of belonging in the city.2. To track the process by which homeownership evolved through a longitudinal study of the massive development of private residential estates, to understand state involvement thereof, and to explore the transforming notion of family, modernity, material comfort, and community.3. To challenge static analytical mindsets by highlighting my unique blend of scholarly and business experiences, humanities and social science perspectives; building on concepts such as flows and process, human agency, negotiated cultural meaning and power-play; using cutting-edge technologies in visual representation to illuminate research findings.4. To draw on research findings to inform public discussions of a crucial social issue in Hong Kong, as well as policy formulation in this critical arena that affects political legitimacy.5. To prepare a monograph that focuses primarily on Hong Kong, and to extend the study to a comparative analysis that includes such places as the United States, the Asian Tigers, and mainland China in their own eras of socioeconomic development.6. To explore the potential to develop an inter-institutional and international network of scholars studying homeownership, an issue of global import, and to stimulate further collaborative research initiatives.