Abstract
How are relations of care impacted by urban renewal and redevelopment processes in a property-led urban economy? This question isn’t easily answered, but interdisciplinary urban studies scholar Shu-Mei Huang reveals the rich and troubling processes at play in this new volume from Lexington Books entitled Urbanizing Carescapes: One City, Two Systems. Influenced by a diverse field of feminist and post-structuralist scholars of cities, care and citizenship, the book is at once wide-ranging in its scope and resolutely focused towards the effort suggested by the title. Hong Kong is the setting, a city where urban renewal practices, housing affordability, citizenship and identity politics and the legacies of colonial governance create a complex tapestry to which Huang lends the eye of an ethnographer-participant and critical analyst.
The book has several objectives. First and foremost, Huang seeks to develop the relationship between two contradictory logics (or ‘systems’), that of ‘rent as capital’ and ‘care as needs’. Carescapes, a productive re-engagement with Appadurai’s (1996) oft-evoked trope, materialise this relationship by embedding care in an ever-changing urban landscape. Huang argues that urbanisation processes premised upon rent-seeking displace people and the relations of care which reproduce labour and, hence, upon which life depends. On the surface this relationship may seem at once obvious but challenging to locate; however, it is grounded in the book in a series of redevelopment cases that intersect with stories of the impact of rising rents and relocation on low-income individuals and households, many of whom are women who have emigrated from Mainland China. Alongside this main theme are a number of other currents, some of which are interventions in theoretical debates, others of which derive from the singular context of Hong Kong under One Country, Two Systems. As the play on words in the book’s subtitle suggests, the evolving post-handover relationship with Beijing, particularly as reflected in migration policies and a mutual economic dependence, is omnipresent in an interest in the ways that carescapes unfold across borders and are bound up with citizenship rights. Another argument relates to the dialectic between autonomy and dependence, which is borne out at different scales, from Hong Kong-Mainland relations, to neighbourhoods, to the individual. A further important thread is mobility, as Huang insistently shows that mobility compromises care, often of the most vulnerable.
The empirical chapters that form the core of the book are based upon research in two older districts, Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island and Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. Both of these areas, like most of the built-up core of Hong Kong, have been subject to accelerating, though increasingly contested, government-led urban renewal and private speculation since the 1980s. Huang historicises these practices, connecting them to colonial governance and incremental policy shifts that have turned property development into an immensely profitable platform for both small and large scale investors. The underside of the rampant increases in value is, of course, the speculative logic of rent-seeking, which renders tenancy increasingly precarious.
The chapters focusing on Wan Chai (3, 4 and 5) trace the ongoing transformation of the district which, due to its proximity to the financial district, has come under intense redevelopment pressure. Here, projects with flashy names like ‘Queen’s Cube’ are rising alongside Chinese tong lau buildings and street markets. These chapters also detail the various ways these processes are contested by networks of community organisations working with residents and business owners threatened with displacement. Opposition to the demolition of Wedding Card Street, and to the cluster of old residential buildings around ‘The Blue House’, Huang shows, has been at times represented within a discourse of ‘conservation’ that has the unintended effect of obscuring the social effects of displacement caused by renewal. Here, Huang creatively probes the politics of representation at play. One of the most fruitful sections in the book, on the production of serviced apartments and carescapes in Wan Chai, appears in Chapters 4 and 5. Here, Huang reveals the speculative dynamics driving the rapidly developing market for short-stay apartments that offer a variety of hotel-like services. She also queries the meanings inherent in the consumption of serviced living among expatriates. The ‘expatriation of space’, as a key feature of Wan Chai’s transformation, requires elites to consume the illusion that they are autonomous, when actually the various ‘services’ offered in these units are discreetly performed by low-wage workers whose paid labour no doubt places a strain upon reproductive labour in their own households. Here, and in later chapters, Huang draws our attention to the invisible dependence on ‘others’ in care relations, but also to self-care. The chapters on Sham Shui Po similarly present a grounded view of experiences of redevelopment and displacement. Here, the lives of residents are portrayed in greater detail than in earlier chapters. The stories presented are of women and families who Huang met through grassroots organisations opposing displacement. While travels are common for them, both to and from work within the city and to visit and care for family members across the border, the prospect of being uprooted by rising rent or renewal is a form of mobility that hovers in the inevitable future.
The greatest strength of the book is that it covers immense ground, both theoretically and empirically, in a coherent and creative way. One moment we learn about the reasons for the removal of rent control in the 1980s. A short while later we see an example of the effects of rising rent on tenants, who are also recent migrants still finding their way in the city, through stories about their daily lives. Huang expertly weaves these different levels and processes together, with an ethnographic sensitivity that few books on urban development achieve. Given the diversity of topics covered, however, this reader wondered if a more sustained treatment of the main focus of the book could have been possible in some chapters. Carescapes were often returned to, but at times seemed secondary to a broader treatment of the condition of Hong Kong. Then again, as Huang argues forcefully throughout the book, care is an integral part of the social and material fabric of the urban, not only in Hong Kong but in every city. Here, like elsewhere, so much care work is done by ‘others’ – foreign domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, elderly people, immigrants from the Mainland. The fact that familial care relations are further rendered tenuous in property-led development, and that this is inseparable from both the commodification and outsourcing of care and the production of the urban form, is starkly evident. So then, carescapes are central to the condition(s) of Hong Kong – economic, political, relational. In this context where the logic of capital pervades all, Huang, following Lawson (2007), invites us to consider who is responsible for care. An observation in the preface is telling: young activists who took to the streets in the umbrella movement cared for one another, perhaps in ways they had never done before, even for themselves, as they camped out in 2014 in an effort to fight for democratic reform.
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.