'Old Hong Kong' and the Present City: Narrating Disappearance in the Midst of Crisis

Abstract

Writing on the eve of the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997, cultural critic Ackbar Abbas suggested that decolonization had not ushered in a critical ‘postcolonial consciousness’ amongst Hong Kong citizens, who had yet to develop effective strategies to interrogate the colonial past. Amongst various cultural forms, Abbas singled out the preservation of architecture to be the most problematic. This is because, as the main material support of visual ideology, preservation tends to present the past in romanticized built forms that ‘give us history in site, but also keeping history in sight’. Culture as preservation then, Abbas concludes, leads not to the development of a critical sense of history but the disappearance of history, where preserved buildings -- now construed as ‘heritage’, have kept the colonial subject in place, occupied with gazing at images of identity. Taking Abba’s thesis as a reference frame, this paper examines how Hong Kong’s architecture has been used as a key element for narrating the city’s past in three different historical moments: the early 1880s, which saw the colony underwent an extraordinary property boom that led to accelerating redevelopment in the central city; the mid-1930s, a period followed by a prolonged recession with businesses and real estate developers calling to boost the economy with a series of new building schemes; and the 1990s, a time preceded the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from Britain to China with a surge of interest amongst citizens in preserving the territory’s built heritage. While concurring with Abbas’s critique of the problematic of preservation and tendency to romanticize Hong Kong’s urban past, this paper shows that a closer examination of each set of narratives about architecture and urban change in the three periods suggests that each represents specific responses to emergent economic and political crisis of its time, where the past was rendered as a powerful resource to mediate senses of uncertainty and growing desires to secure a cultural identity in the midst of crisis. It is argued that a comparison of these narratives enables not only a better understanding of the modes of urban development and politics of identity in the three periods, but also the continuities and discontinuities of urban processes that shaped the forms and norms of Hong Kong’s built environment across time. Crucially, the attention to the perspectives of different social actors and the moral claims associated with the ‘disappearance’ of built forms illustrates both the shared sentiments about the city’s colonial past as well as the divergent values ascribed to building properties that constitute its urban landscape. The findings from this study will contribute to existing scholarship on Hong Kong’s planning history by highlighting the dialogic processes through which different constituencies participated in the ongoing remaking of the built environment and the construction of enduring discourses about Hong Kong and its urban milieu.