Social Condenser Extraordinaire: the Municipal Services Buildings of Hong Kong

Abstract

<p>Despite being one of the colonial-era spatial instruments for placating the perturbed masses wrought by the post-war refugee influx, what is today known as the ‘municipal services building (MSB)’ in Hong Kong has evolved to become a rare indigenous architectural type where the public “urban living room” a la the Metabolists is actualized. From the post-modern pink-tiled and wavy-balconied triple atrium of the Smithfield MSB to the ventilation-ducted cooked food center of the Kowloon City MSB that harks to the Pompidou, young and old come together to eat, read, work out and repose. Compelled into existence by demographic density and a planning-imposed space scarcity, the extensions of eating, studying, working out, which in other cities can take place in the privacy of the domestic sphere or in separate volumes of singular functions, are socially condensed in the MSB’s vertically stacked multiple programs in a single volume. From the wet market and food courts to a variety of sports facilities, libraries, theaters and other spaces for cultural functions, the fact that this uber social condenser has remained publicly owned also confounds the market-priorities of the poster-child city of laissez faire governance. In the post-pandemic era where the urgency for a new social urbanism is highlighted by the protracted three-year global trauma of enforced social isolation, a re-visiting of what seems to represent today a bygone era of civicness is much warranted.</p><p>This piece will firstly briefly unpack the development trajectory of the MSB, contextualizing its inceptions as Urban Council complexes in the aftermaths of civil disturbances from the late 1960s, and the type’s embodiment of these ensuing civic aspirations and the forming of a social urbanism. Renamed as MSBs after 1997’s Handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, a decolonization of the territory sans independence, they have remained the last public bastions in the Special Administrative Region transitioning further into executive-led neoliberalization. That there has been no new constructions of the MSB since the 2010s in the SAR seem to magnify the precarity of this architectural type a in face of a growing erosion of municipalness and the social urbanism it has embodied. In face of obsolescence, this piece will re-look at MSB the different ways this unique architectural and urban type contributes to a social urbanism.</p>