Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Simone Chung, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In 2000s Hong Kong, there emerged community movements resisting displacements mobilizing the discourses of cultural heritage. Some critics assert that the cultural heritage would only be appropriated by business sectors and become the forces of gentrification. Without denying that cultural heritage has been manipulated for capital accumulation in some circumstances, this paper brings the radical tradition of heritage preservation back into the scene.

In this presentation, I am going to contextualize how and why the discourses of cultural heritage were mobilized in community movements in Hong Kong in 2000s. I argue that the seemingly “non-materialistic” discourses of cultural heritage actually provided opportunities for the potentially displaced communities to engage with the state without being distorted as “greedy residents”. Dominant understanding of “rights” in Hong Kong has often been associated with “ownership”. “Public” and “private” spaces are understood in terms of ownership, and was inherited from a colonial understanding of land in Hong Kong. Cultural heritage, associated with “sense of place” and “place-attachment” actually provides an alternative understanding of “rights” disassociated from property ownership” and thus usher in the idea of the right to the city and ideas of alternatives beyond the property regime. The critical engagement of the cultural heritage have the possibilities to decolonize the understanding of land and provide spaces for imagining a new urban common.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Desmond Hok-Man Sham is a postdoctoral fellow of the Asian Urbanisms Cluster in Asia Research Institute. He obtained his PhD from Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests are postcolonial studies, heritage preservation, the city and arts, and cultural policy. During his appointment at ARI, Dr Sham is undertaking a research project titled “Politics of Postcolonial Heritage-making in East and Southeast Asian Cities”. The project will analyze how the dynamics between the state, capital and civil society shapes the process of heritage-making in East and Southeast Asian cities, with specific reference to Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The project also aims at analyzing how the preservation of cultural heritage may provide “spaces of hope” in the neoliberalization era.

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