Architecture and Urban Living in Early 20th Century South China

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which architecture and urban living have been articulated in the popular press in Hong Kong and Canton in the mid 1930s – a period that saw both cities underwent accelerating real estate speculation and the emergence of new types of residential spaces and urban amenities. While much have been written on “modern” Asian metropolises such as Shanghai and Tokyo, less attention has been paid to developments in other urban centers and their roles in the ongoing construction of cultural knowledge that traversed across the region. This paper will examine reports of new building and infrastructural projects in Hong Kong and Canton that appeared in trade journals and how these writings converged with and diverged from other narratives of urban living by writers of different social positions. It argues that although modernizing projects were initiated by professional experts, the shift toward a new urban milieu was facilitated by a host of moralizing practices that took place across multiple sites and scales. An examination of the articles circulating in the Chinese press in the period, for example, reveals not only a widespread obsession with different facets of modern living ranging from the improvement of hygiene to the design of domestic furnishings, but also a conscious effort to construct a regional, modern “Cantonese” identity set in contrast to the “backward” Chinese Mainland. Meanwhile, the proliferating discussion of modernization also prompted new demand for better housing and right to urban services among the less wealthy. By attending to the connection between building forms and social norms in this period, I seek to illustrate the formation of “epistemic communities” amidst ongoing capitalist urban development and the dialogic processes through which an increasing number of Chinese participated in a new mode of self-governance and construction of an emergent moral topography.