Temporalities, Territories and Economies: Rethinking Hong Kong Urbanism through Infrastructure

Abstract

Over the last two decades, infrastructure has emerged as a key research subject for scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Critical geographers, for example, have traced different types of infrastructure networks to expose uneven patterns of socio-spatial development and changing rationalities of governance. Anthropologists and sociologists have deciphered how interactions with infrastructure at different scales produce new forms of knowledge, relationships and collective imaginaries. Additionally, STS scholars have focused on the socio- technical assemblages of infrastructure, directing attention to the ongoing transformation of infrastructural systems and the technopolitics that shape and reshape the forms and practices of the built environment. In this project, we examine four types of infrastructure in Hong Kong completed between the 1960s and early 1980s: roads and highways, the Mass Transit Railway (MTR), water supplies, and electricity works. Building on insights from recent scholarship in infrastructure studies, we consider the “state of becoming” of each of these systems in a period characterized by rapid economic take-off and major landscape transformation across the territory. By doing so, we hope to open up new questions about the shifting political, economic and social concerns that underlay the making of Hong Kong at different scales. How does infrastructure planning structure the territory, resource (re)distribution and territorial governance? How may an examination of the changing landscapes through infrastructure provision reveal the material politics from the scale of micropolitics to geopolitics? How do planners and officials articulate certain ideologies and attempt to incorporate new subject types through the projection of infrastructure demand? How do infrastructure projects produce new experiences, aspirations, and senses of belonging or estrangement amongst citizens? Finally, how does infrastructure work as political technologies of (liberal) rule in late colonial Hong Kong amidst accelerating neoliberalisation of its economy and onset of political transition? By tracing the planning visions of the four types of infrastructure in question and the shifting rationales of their management over time, this study also aims to elucidate the projective capacity of infrastructure and their essential temporality. A revisit of these histories thus allows us not only to reflect on the changing assumptions of the values and significance of infrastructure, but also on how political realities, economic feasibility and collective practices of anticipation have contributed to the ongoing reshaping of Hong Kong’s urban milieu.