Urban Regeneration of Traditional Street Markets in Hong Kong

This project investigates the socio-spatial politics of land redevelopment and displacement in Hong Kong by examining living and working experiences in public spaces. It engages with local aspirations for a “good life” and “livelihood guarantees” through the lens of street markets. Street markets provide a unique perspective for interrogating political discourses surrounding the urban and for analyzing the negotiation processes between the vertical strategies of urban renewal and the horizontal tactics of urban resistance. They serve as barometers for equity, economic development, collective social interactions, sustainability, social flourishing, and community cohesion. The project focuses on Hong Kong’s traditional markets to analyze how “people-shaping-place” contributes to the construction of collective identity in public spaces, as well as to the preservation of living heritage. Framing Hong Kong’s markets as expressions of informal urbanism, the project attends to how vernacular, often precarious, practices of trade and sociability inhabit and reshape spaces targeted for sanitization and redevelopment. Over the last three decades, rezoning regulations have progressively accelerated the repurposing of public space for property development. The paper examines urban justice at both governmental and community levels to unpack the multi-layered identity of Hong Kong. The project aims to illuminate examples of grassroots flourishing across space and to explore urban ethical imagination for progressive socioeconomic projects in the context of increasing precarity.