The legal geography of Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong's 'last Ghetto'

Abstract

This thesis develops a theory-oriented ethnographic inquiry into Chungking Mansions, a mixed-use building complex in Hong Kong. Situated in the field of legal geography, the thesis examines how law (and other forms of normativity) are articulated within and through urban space, and how this material organization of legality relates to broader concerns about governance, surveillance, and globalization.

As a site that defies conventional definition and possesses a complicated past, Chungking Mansions – considered home to a number of Hong Kong’s ethnic minority communities – is an inverted reflection of the city. By constructing a ‘lawspace- power nexus’ using the works of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and a range of contemporary legal scholars, the thesis examines the ways in which bodies, borders, and objects are organized within this site, thereby shedding light on the complex assemblage of law, normativity, materiality, and human agency that constitutes Chungking Mansions as a unique site of subaltern globalization. The ethnographic methodology used in this thesis aims to illustrate the normative complexity of this space and how it is shaped by forms of governance, law, and power, operative at interpersonal, city, state, and even global scales.

In examining how law materially shapes space (and is shaped by it), as well as paying attention to how this impacts the delineation and deployment of power, four key sites of investigation emerge in Chungking Mansions: its street, its infrastructure, its businesses, and its spaces of refuge. Looking at the enmeshment of space and law in each of these sites reveals diverse forms of spatio-legal practices, such as tout-veillance (carried out by street touts), infrastructural management (conducted by the building management association), various techniques of state regulation, and bodily withdrawal by asylum-seekers.

What these practices reveal are the complex and fluctuating entanglements of law, space, and power that make up the subaltern spatio-legal assemblage of Chungking Mansions. The bodies, borders, and objects that permeate this space both shape and are shaped by a range of regulatory techniques, various practices of surveillance and counter-surveillance, and local and global flows of people, goods, and capital. The subaltern spatio-legal assemblage of Chungking Mansions is revealed to be a site contested and suffused with circulating objects, regulated bodies, and spatial borders, operating at different scales and registers. In essence, ‘seeing’ and reading the subaltern assemblage offers an alternative and provocative way of ‘seeing’ and reading the city.

This ethnographic study of the subaltern spatio-legality of Chungking Mansions thereby expands legal geography scholarship by extending existing research on the co-relational nature of law and space and shedding new light on the oft-ignored subaltern spaces of the city. Looking at the relationship between law and the city from the unique perspective of the subaltern assemblage allows one to see the city as the site of a complex and shifting array of regulatory forces (and forms of resistance), operating at a range of distinct yet interweaving scales in urban space.