Accumulation, Segregation, and the Production of Space in a Speculative City

Abstract

This paper is composed of excerpts from two chapters in an upcoming book, Colonial Urban Development in Hong Kong: Segregation and Speculative Housing in the City (Planning, History, and Environment Series, Routledge, 2020). The book traces a spatial history of Hong Kong through the lens of speculative building practices. Encompassing the period of British rule from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, the book explores the significance of property relations in the shaping of the forms and norms of the colonial built environment. It does so by examining three important but under-examined aspects: 1) the linkages between modern planning and property investment and their effects on spatial segregation; 2) the introduction of new housing models targeted at specific classes and ethnicities by European and Chinese developers; and 3) the emergence of a distinctive ‘speculative governmentality’ in which a growing number of Chinese sought to claim a stake in the expanding colonial economy by participating in property activities. The historical perspective offered by the book will also provide a new explanation for the ‘Hong Kong economic miracle’ of the postwar period, focusing on the central role played by property investment, and extending to its ongoing importance in the postcolonial present. Although the postwar decades have commonly been identified as a formative period of modern Hong Kong, many contemporary spatial conditions were already present in the second half of the 19th century. Long hailed for its laissez-faire credentials and market freedom, Hong Kong offers a unique context to study what I call ‘speculative urbanism,’ wherein the colonial government’s heavy reliance on generating tax revenue from private property supported a lucrative housing market that enriched a large number of property owners and rentier lords. This was also a period in which the propertied class became incorporated more tightly into the colonial governing regime. A consequence of the rapid urban growth and increase of private property ownership was the alignment of interests between Chinese and European landowners, who often came together to contest legislation that affected their shared prospects, such as taxation, rent control, the regulation of building standards and provision of urban services. Although resenting the discrimination they encountered in the colonial territory, many Chinese sojourners were able to accumulate substantial economic and social capital by investing on property. By the 1880s, a majority of private property holdings in Hong Kong came under the control of Chinese, with some of them becoming shareholders of prominent European companies. A major goal of the research is to shed light on how a particular social consensus was achieved in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city. By focusing on speculative building practices and evolving regulatory frameworks that shaped the built environment, I illustrate some of the inherent contradictions in colonial development between the liberal, laissez-faire ideology that propelled capitalist expansion, and the exclusionary impulses that clung to a hierarchical spatial order. While the bifurcated colonial milieu helped legitimized different rules for different peoples, it also opened up new channels for cultural and political negotiations. And although the overall rate of property ownership remained low in Hong Kong, the proliferating discussion of modernization and urban living introduced a new cultural vocabulary that helped to expand the collective imagination of the modern city.