Abstract
Although alternative spaces are intended to represent a rupture from ‘mainstream’ forms of urbanity and are thus often depicted as autonomous enclaves by scholars, this chapter demonstrates how they are influenced by the very urban conditions they seek to challenge. Using Hong Kong as an example, the chapter examines how urban land-use policies and power imbalances between the government and the population affect the manifestation of alternative spaces and determine whether they can be maintained over time. Analysis of Occupy Central (2011–2012) and Woofer Ten (2009–2015) shows that despite using differing methods to challenge government-led urbanism, both alternative spaces shared common ground in straddling an ambiguous line between legality and illegality, antagonising Special Administrative Region (SAR) officials and ostracising support from the Hong Kong public, ultimately affecting the lifespan of these urban alternatives.
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Notes
- 1.
Fieldwork was conducted from December 2010 until July 2012. Data was collected through participant-observation and in-depth interviews with informants (youths between the ages of 19 and 35) who, with the exception of Lee Chun Fung, are represented through pseudonyms.
- 2.
Some land is exempt from the leasehold system; St. John’s Cathedral in Central was granted freehold status because of its religious function and male descendants of indigenous New Territories villagers have the right to own land.
- 3.
For example, the 2014 Umbrella Movement was a response to the undemocratic Chief Executive election procedures but became a platform for new modes of urbanity to be established by the grassroots. Roads and plazas in Central, Admiralty, and Mong Kok were transformed by youth protesters into experimental sites for urban farming and communal living.
- 4.
Occupy Central is different from Occupy Central with Love and Peace of the Umbrella Movement.
- 5.
The word kaifong also refers to the affective relationships within a specific locality. Lee Chun Fung explains that kaifong “synthesises, in one conceptual compound, ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ … kaifong refers to the web or the dense tangle of relationships that accrete over a territory, a network of mutual aid composed of those in which one depends, places one’s trust in” (Woofer Ten, 2016, p. 22). The kaifong mode of community organisation has been prevalent in Hong Kong since the mid-twentieth century but has gradually been destroyed by estate hegemony.
- 6.
Woofer Ten’s lease expired in 2013, but the centre refused to leave and squatted at the Shanghai Street Artspace until November 2015.
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Lam-Knott, S. (2019). Carving Enclaves of Alternative Urbanisms in Hong Kong. In: Fisker, J., Chiappini, L., Pugalis, L., Bruzzese, A. (eds) Enabling Urban Alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1531-2_11
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