Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong: Two Systems, One City

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Drawing upon the massive redevelopment catalyzed by the government-led urban renewal in Hong Kong in the past two decades, Shu-Mei Huang recharges the story of post-colonial Hong Kong through care, displacement, and how care is displaced in urban governance. Theorizing carescapes as a heuristic device, Huang tracks how care is displaced, undervalued and even exploited in transforming urban landscape. In a rather counter-intuitive way, Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong: Two Systems, One City considers the post-colonial picturing of One Country, Two Systems as insufficient if not misleading in understanding the city of Hong Kong and its changing ties with the world. Huang illustrates the way in which each urban citizen is propelled to be a self-enterprising subject and local urban initiatives are becoming cross-border investments upon global mobility. In an era when putatively both the talents and capital are moving toward Asia, the book illuminates how dynamism of colonialism is sustained rather than disappears within the two systems in one city.

Reviews

The greatest strength of the book is that it covers immense ground, both theoretically and empirically, in a coherent and creative way.... In short, this is an innovative, important and timely book. It should be read by anyone who cares about Hong Kong and the fate of care in our urban age. * Urban Studies *
Shu-Mei Huangs book not only offers a superb account of the human challenges created by one of the worlds most expensive housing systems, but also breaks new theoretical ground in integrating issues of housing and urban development and processes of caring through the idea of the carescape, which has great relevance for understanding other cities as well. -- Alan Smart, University of Calgary

Author Bio

Shu-Mei Huang is assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University.