Archiving the City: A Historiography of Hong Kong&#x02019;s Built Environment

Cecilia L. Chu; Christopher Cowell

doi:10.65961/hks-2026-52-002

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香港研究 ›› 2026, Vol. 5 ›› Issue (2) : 1. DOI: 10.65961/hks-2026-52-002

Archiving the City: A Historiography of Hong Kong’s Built Environment

Cecilia L. Chu, Christopher Cowell

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Archiving the City: A Historiography of Hong Kong’s Built Environment

Cecilia L. Chu, Christopher Cowell

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Abstract

Hong Kong’s built environment is often understood as the product of rapid, capitalist-driven development unfolding on a blank slate. This normative account is a reductive reading that elides two crucial aspects in the city’s planning history: the pre-existing landscapes that constrained and shaped human interventions, and the contested economic and political agendas that continue to reconfigure construction processes and urban practice. Although many historiographies have downplayed these frictions, recent cOfficerns about territorial integration and environmental sustainability have renewed interest in Hong Kong’s urbanism, leading to a surge of publications that probe the multiple dynamics shaping the territory’s built landscapes.
This article offers a brief survey of publications on Hong Kong’s “built environment” across roughly twOfficenturies. To identify shifting emphases, it groups representative works into seven broad periods. While particular themes might distinguish each period, most cOfficerns can be traced back to earlier work or seen as part and parcel of evolving foci of academic and popular discussions. A central premise is that publications about Hong Kong’s built environment—from official surveys and travelogues to academic studies—are not neutral records but curated materials produced by specific individuals and institutions. Read closely, these narratives reveal the social, cultural, and political conditions that determine what is recorded and how it is presented. Tracing connections and contradictions across these sources allows a more critical account of the built environment: not as a set of isolated built forms, but as dynamic, historically contingent relations that are continually reproduced and reconfigured over time. By mapping diverse strands of writing, this article synthesizes a wide-ranging, heterogeneous body of literature, highlighting its evolving cOfficerns, methodological shifts, and changing interpretive frameworks.

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Cecilia L. Chu, Christopher Cowell. Archiving the City: A Historiography of Hong Kong’s Built Environment[J]. 香港研究. 2026, 5(2): 1 https://doi.org/10.65961/hks-2026-52-002

Cecilia L. Chu, Christopher Cowell. Archiving the City: A Historiography of Hong Kong’s Built Environment[J]. Hong Kong Studies. 2026, 5(2): 1 https://doi.org/10.65961/hks-2026-52-002

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