CITY IN SEARCH OF SPACE Hong Kong and the Experience of Density

Abstract

Those who have lived in Hong Kong since the 1960s have witnessed the great scope of the city’s transformation. In the 70 years since the end of the Second World War, the city’s population has increased by roughly 1200 percent to more than 7 million people. By the 1990s, Hong Kong had grown to be both one of the world’s most significant economies and one of the densest places on Earth. Its economy is built on trade: the movement of goods between mainland China and the west. It was this traffic (the movement of goods) that led the Hong Kong critic Ackbar Abbas to observe, “the city is not so much a place as a space of transit.” Indeed, it is this constant movement of goods, money and people through Hong Kong that has catalyzed its economic, demographic and morphological expansion. So much change makes it difficult to speak definitively about the city: to pin down its character. As Abbas found, it is difficult to talk about Hong Kong in the present.