Resistant City

This vivid book is an inquiry into the stagnation between the development of architectural practice and the progress in urban modernization. It is about islands as territories of resistance. It is about dense places where multitudes dwell in perennial contestations with the city on every front. It is about the histories, tactics and spaces of everyday survival within the hegemonic sway of global capital and unstoppable development. It is preoccupied with making visible the culture of resistance and architecture's entanglement with it. It is about urban resilience. It is about Hong Kong, where uncertainty is status quo.This interdisciplinary volume explores real and invented places and identities that are created in tandem with Hong Kong's urban development. Mapping contested spaces in the territory, it visualizes the energies and tenacity of the people as manifest in their daily life, social and professional networks and the urban spaces in which they inhabit. Embodying the multifaceted nature of the Asian metropolis, the book utilizes a combination of archival materials, public data sources, field observations and documentation, analytical drawings, models, and maps.Related Link(s)Contents: Prologue: Islandness and ResistanceMaps: Territories of ContestationNoirs: The City, the Woman and Other SpacesTowers: Technologies, Jardine House and Metropolitan VisionsComposites: The City in a BuildingNarratives: Composite Building StudiesExcursus: Mapping Toilet ArchitectureManuals: Resistance in PraxisEpilogue: Resistant DomesticitiesAfterword: Utopia to RealizationAcknowledgements/Credits
Readership: Rich in historical, theoretical and visual analysis, this original monograph is essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding and interpreting urban built environments as an accumulation and contestation of spaces and territories. Students of architecture, art and design history, urban design, urban history, urban studies, geography, Asian and cultural studies, will find the methodological approaches, investigations and visualizations useful in shaping their own perspectives on the urban.Architecture;Hong Kong;Urban Planning0Key Features:Comprising historical and field research, this book is the first of its kind to examine the architecture and urbanization of Hong Kong through evidence and visual analyses in first-hand accountsThere are no other books covering the city with the same depth and breadth of description and analysisBuilding upon existing scholarship and public discourses on Hong Kong, it puts forth new methods in which a city and its architecture can be studied, rediscovered and re-presentedThe book examine the conflicting issues of density, design, housing development, identity, land and territory, and presents and narrates them vividly through the lens of urban resilience, thus resistant cityEach chapter can be read independently in any order, yet, when read in its entirety from beginning to end, the multiple scales and processes of resistance and resilience become explicit