Alan Smart will be giving a talk based on his recently published book, Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985, which was co-authored with Charles Chi-keung Fung.
Informality, particularly squatting and street vending, was pervasive in Hong Kong until the 1980s. After four decades of failing to end new squatting after the Second World War, and with their numbers climbing to over 750,000 in 1982, the colonial Hong Kong government finally succeeded after 1984. Informality, and the tactics used to control it, had a huge impact on the social and economic landscape of the colony. Based on extensive archival research and my own ethnographic research in the 1980s, Alan Smart considers various explanations of how and why new squatting was finally ended. In doing so, some new perspectives on public housing and migration management are offered.
The authors, Alan Smart and Charles Chi-keung Fung, trace two decades of the development of squatting in Hong Kong. They reconstruct the government policy on squatting through both ethnographic and archival research. They argued that the management of squatter resettlement had a massive impact on the development of Hong Kong's public housing system and more generally on the landscape and social organization of late colonial and contemporary Hong Kong.
Overall, Smart and Fung make an important contribution to the understanding of how public housing and squatting interacted in influential ways that have been poorly understood and offer new perspectives on the challenges of urban governance and housing problems.
The Speaker
ALAN SMART is a Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Anthropology and Archaeology at University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Toronto (1986). Research interests include political economy, housing, urban anthropology, anthropology of law, borders, zoonotic diseases, smart cities and posthumanism.
Field research conducted in Hong Kong, China and Canada. Author of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires, and Colonial Rule, Posthumanism: Anthropological Perspectives (co-author Josephine Smart), Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Informality and Geopolitics, 1963-1985 (with Charles Chi-keung Fung, in press) and numerous book chapters and articles.
PROGRAMME
Venue: Online event by Zoom
Admission: Zoom links are free for members of RASHK and sister societies only. Non-members are welcome depending on availability.
Registration: Please email <membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk> and provide your membership number, if applicable, at the time of registration.
Registration will be closed at 12 noon on 10 October 2023. Zoom links will be sent before or by 9 October 2023.