Building colonial Hong Kong : speculative development and segregation in the city
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Building colonial Hong Kong : speculative development and segregation in the city
（Planning, history and the environment series）
Routledge, 2022
- : hardback
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-219) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepot, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation.
In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the 'Hong Kong story' by tracing the emergence of its 'speculative landscape' from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong's urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements.
1. Framing Colonial Urban Development.
2. A Dual City in the Making: Accumulation and Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Victoria.
3. Combatting Nuisance: Urban Improvement and the Colonial Conundrum.
4. Remapping Forms and Norms: From 'Insanitary Properties' to Modern Housing.
5. Constructing Enclaves: A New Era of Suburban Development.
6. The Housing Crisis and the Making of the Modern City.
Afterword: 'Old Hong Kong' and the Present City.
Abbreviations and Notes on Romanization.
Bibliography.
Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"
