Making visible: Hong Kong mansions and spaces of housework, 1940s-1970s

Abstract

<p>The disappearance of servants’ rooms in Hong Kong apartments coincided with the city’s rise of foreign domestic labor in the 1980s. This paper studies the evolution of the spaces of domestic labor in apartment buildings from the 1940s through 1970s in Hong Kong and how they form a crucial base for the city’s discourses on density, environment, and identity. In January 1948, Credit Foncier completed a three-story apartment house on the Peak. The Hong Kong and Far East Builder commented, “the roomy kitchens in these flats should be of particular interest to wives who pride themselves in their domestic capabilities.” The construction of a significant number of multi-story projects for composite use between eight and twenty stories, mainly domestic accommodation but including shops and offices, complicated this postwar trope of domesticity. Named “mansions,” they arose in tandem with deracializing housing classification as European or Chinese types in colonial postwar Hong Kong. Exploring the interplay between the domestic spaces and the politics that enable them, the primary focus will be on a gendered analysis of the housing plans by speculative builders, developers, and architects, to make visible the systemic exclusion that produces the spatial practices and spaces of domestic work.</p>