Abstract
Set in the context of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest movement in Hong Kong, this study focuses on selected material and social appropriations of space including community-focused events held in shopping malls, the establishment of networks connecting consumers to suppliers with like-minded political values, and human chains. Drawing on popular concepts such as scale, network and place-frames found in the literature on contentious politics, we argue that the place-making practices observed during the period of study became claim-making practices that effectively framed movement aims and projected movement claims beyond the neighbourhood scale into a dynamic contestation at the city and national scales. Adopting key elements of neighbourhood as defined by Jenks and Dempsey, we highlight that the socio-spatial practices of the Anti-ELAB protests not only re-cast city spaces into neighbourhood spaces but also redefined traditional understandings of neighbourhood as a socio-spatial construct. We argue that during the Anti-ELAB movement an ‘ideological neighbourhood’ emerged in which spatial relationality is not borne out through physical proximity. Instead, connections between functional and social units were established through ideological affinity. These new connections and the replication of neighbourhood-based practices reinforced the construction of a socially and politically distinct Hong Kong identity. We extend the literatures on contentious politics and urban sociology by showing that the ideology and the imaginaries of movement participants can become spatially manifest and thus defensible in the physical world through new territorialities such as the neighbourhood.
Introduction
In June 2019, millions of people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong to march in protest against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019 (Wan Chan and Pun, 2020). As time passed the protests evolved into a movement (commonly referred to as the Anti-ELAB movement) concerned with deeper questions of Hong Kong’s political and cultural identity with respect to China. The movement’s aims and frames can be found in the lyrics to Glory to Hong Kong and popular slogans such as, ‘Five demands, not one less!’ and ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!’. The five demands include: full withdrawal of the Extradition bill, a commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality and misconduct, retracting the classification of protestors as ‘rioters’, amnesty for arrested protestors and universal suffrage. Currently, open elections are only held for the appointment of members of the Legislative Council, the Chief Executive is appointed by a decree of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. During the height of the movement (June to October 2019), citizens engaged in a wide variety of resistance strategies, including but not limited to boycotting companies perceived as being in favour of the establishment, occupying the airport to bring international awareness to their cause, organising mass sing-ins at shopping malls and constructing Lennon Walls (Ting, 2020; Wan Chan and Pun, 2020). Each of these strategies not only encapsulated the struggle over Hong Kong’s political and cultural identity, collectively, they also provide examples of how the practices of protestors and citizens appropriated space and thus created new meanings of place.
Research on contentious politics (Tarrow and Tilly, 2007) has explored the role of urban space in contentious politics (Nicholls et al., 2013; Sewell, 2001; Tilly, 2000), particularly on the politics of scale, networks and mobility. Notions such as scale-jumping, scalar and multi-scalar strategies, ‘networked movement’ have dominated the literature (Mayer, 2013). Such lenses may encourage the replication of certain narratives of space and the preferencing of one spatiality as ‘the master spatiality’ (Leitner et al., 2008). The assertion of a singular or preferred spatiality may be at odds with the practices and intent of contentious politics. Social movements typically aim to re-signify places that represent the priorities they are contesting and establish new spaces where their imaginaries can be realised through practice (Leitner et al., 2008: 162). Participants assume the existence of multiple spatialities and challenge accepted definitions of particular places by patching together different spatial imaginaries and strategies in spontaneous and creative ways. Significant attention has been devoted to the exploration of the new meanings attached to sites that are the focal points in movement and country-specific contentious politics (Ku, 2012). Fewer studies, however, have considered how contentious politics challenge deeply entrenched perceptions of geographies and conceptions of socio-spatial constructs such as neighbourhood.
This study focuses on the neighbourhood-making that occurred during the Anti-ELAB movement and asks the question: how might the emergence of neighbourhood-making as a contentious performance change the way we understand and define neighbourhoods? To address these theoretical enquiries, we examine a series of neighbourhood-based performative practices adopted by movement sympathisers and show how they established new neighbourhood spaces within the city. We argue that these localised (in both senses of the term) performative practices and their replication across the 18 districts of Hong Kong came to represent expressions of membership in a ‘neighbourhood’ drawn along ideological lines and that transcended the traditional spatial and social boundaries of Hong Kong. Participation in this ‘ideological neighbourhood’ became a mutually reinforcing ‘claim-making routine’ (Tarrow and Tilly, 2007: 8) and solidified the neighbourhood as both a site of mobilisation in Hong Kong’s contentious politics as well as a frame through which the people of all 18 districts of Hong Kong could be organised as one.
Below, we introduce the conceptual frame related to this study, including neighbourhood-making, place-making and claim-making, which contains ideology across districts. After introducing the methodology, we explore different practices that were initiated during the movement, including the establishment of community noticeboards and locally based cultural activities (such as community mask-making events and sing-ins at large shopping malls), providing protestors with shelter, connecting politically like-minded consumers and vendors, and establishing human chains. We then conclude by discussing the emergence of an ideological neighbourhood, its characteristics and meanings to urban social movement. Here it is important to note that our use of the term ‘ideological’ instead of terms such as ‘solidarity’ or ‘struggling’ used by Arampatzi (2017a, 2017b) is intentional.
Literature review
Neighbourhood-making
Neighbourhood has been given importance in studies of social movements because it is where connections between residents, activists and the public are forged by mobilising new and existing socio-spatial identities, local practices and/or sentiments of attachment and belonging (Brower, 1996; Forrest, 2008). Recent work on neighbourhood and resistance has centred on the social dimension of contention. Significant attention has been given to the characteristics and strategies of neighbourhood-based organisations (e.g. Kellogg, 1999), local community-based issues (e.g. Martin, 2003a) and the dynamic trans-local networks that connect individuals and activists across different neighbourhoods (e.g. Clark, 2009). Studies that consider the spatial dimensions of contention at the neighbourhood level are often interested in the intersection of spatial and social issues such as gentrification, segregation or the preservation of local heritage (e.g. Martin, 2002, 2003a, 2003b). As a result, conclusions are typically drawn looking through lenses developed in the literature of contentious politics rather than urban geography. Fewer studies reflect on how contentious politics that unfold in neighbourhoods or at the neighbourhood level might cause us to understand the constitution of neighbourhood as a socio-spatial construct differently.
Neighbourhoods are defined and experienced differently by different populations, for example residents, marginalised groups, local organisations and government officials. Hallman (1984: 15) defines neighbourhood as an amalgamation of ‘geographical boundaries, ethnic or cultural characteristics of the inhabitants, psychological unity among people who feel that they belong together, or concentrated use of an area’s facilities for shopping, leisure and learning’. Similarly, Logan and Molotch (1987: 108) define neighbourhood as ‘a shared interest in overlapping use values (identity, security and so on) in a single area’. As such, a distinct set of place-making processes that touch on particular spatial, social and functional elements must occur in tandem for a neighbourhood to be brought into existence.
Place-making as a claim-making routine
Places such as neighbourhoods are made through bottom-up, dynamic, person-centred and collaborative processes that give social meaning to spaces (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010). The collective memory and rival interpretations of the past contribute to a multiplicity of meanings of a place in the present (Massey, 1995). The meanings and rules associated with places are often codified in spatial symbols and socially based lexicons of use-value, power relations and historic or contextual narrative. These socio-spatial symbols define territorial boundaries, the rules and norms against which socio-spatial practices are understood (Harvey, 1996) as well as who and what can be included or excluded from a place (Blokland, 2009). Different places are made through unique, context-specific processes.
As mentioned above, the roles that place-making processes play in contentious politics have been widely discussed (Nicholls et al., 2013; Sewell, 2001; Tilly, 2000, 2003). The meanings individuals attribute to places can only be understood through their perceptions, which are inherently punctuated by politicised questions of gender, race and class. Thus, place-making is inherently political and embeds power in space. Many scholars (Creswell, 2004; Lefèbvre, 1991; Martin, 2003b; Massey, 2005; Purcell, 2008), highlight the negotiation and contestation that occurs between different interest groups over the use, ownership, meaning, identity and discursive presentation of a place. Contesting and reimagining the meaning of places shifts the socio-spatial links between people, as such place-making processes and place-frames have been utilised during periods of contentious politics to challenge the dominant narratives of a place. In some instances, place-making becomes a claim-making routine. The Occupy Movement of the 2010s serves as a prominent internationally adopted example of the intentional conflation of place-making and claim-making routines (Kohn, 2013; Lubin, 2012).
With reference to the specific case of contentious politics in Hong Kong, scholars found that during the Umbrella Movement of 2014, spatial appropriation was a defining feature in the contentious repertoire adopted by protestors. Participants were mobilised both through and in space (Wang et al., 2019). Action was mainly centred in busy, downtown Hong Kong. Admiralty, where the government headquarters, a major transport interchange and the city’s financial centre are located, was occupied by citizens and thus transformed into a space administered for and by the people (Veg, 2016). The co-authorship of space has also been a popular topic with scholars exploring the discourses that appeared on the Lennon Wall that appeared on the outside walls in Admiralty (Valjakka, 2020; Veg, 2016). Others have considered how giving physical form to political discourse changed the meaning of place (Cheng and Chan, 2017; Ku, 2012; Wang et al., 2019). Both of these claim-making routines had the effect of ‘re-scaling’ the meanings associated with these places. Large anonymising city spaces were transformed into smaller places where the familiarities and practices of a neighbourhood could be established.
Methodology
Our goal is to identify the establishment of ‘new’ neighbourhoods in the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB movement. Thus, it is necessary to understand and identify two attributes that reciprocally influence the emergence of the other: first, the collective identity of the groups struggling for ownership and definition of the space; and second, the neighbourhood-making activities undertaken by these groups that transformed space into meaningful places of neighbourhood in the urban social movement repertoire.
Starting with the identification of the ‘neighbourhood-makers’ and their associated ideologies and the definition they sought to ascribe to certain spaces, we assumed the sentiments contained in the lyrics of Glory to Hong Kong 1 and the ‘Five demands’ to be key signifiers of movement aims and the collective imaginary of protestors. Moving to more tangible place-making activities, between June and December 2019 we engaged in a process of participant observation guided by a coding matrix we developed. Patsiaouras et al. (2018: 81) point out when analysing the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, ‘the ideological diversity of political movement and the geographical complexity characterising the occupied areas meant that the completion of a holistic case study approach was not possible’. As the same types of events were occurring across all 18 districts of Hong Kong, we adopted purposive sampling, selected four key districts and attended the events or activities that occurred there. We used data available on the political party affiliations of parliamentary seat holders and statements made on news reports to identify strongly pro-movement or pro-democracy districts (or ‘deep yellow’ districts) and strongly pro-government districts (or ‘deep blue’ districts). 2 Acknowledging that different forms of protest are shaped by different urban spaces, we further narrowed our selection of sites by choosing districts with spatial features that might more readily support the mass gathering of people such as those with large spaces including shopping malls or parks located in close proximity to the MTR station. Based on these criteria, we chose Shatin and Wong Tai Sin as representative of ‘yellow districts’; Yuen Long and Tsuen Wan as exemplars of ‘blue districts’.
To collect data, we visited the selected districts regularly to observe the placement of objects and information and the interactions between people. Owing to the open attendance and large crowds at events, with many participants taking photographs and video recordings, our presence as researchers was unlikely to be noticed or change the behaviours of research subjects (Jones, 2021). We took photos and field notes of what we observed to capture the activities or events there. We also analysed Apps including Whatsgap, Eat With You and Hong Kong Shops, Facebook groups (mostly organised by churches or ‘yellow shops’) and Telegram groups (e.g. 612 Reminder) to better help us get a full picture of the context, neighbourhood-making practices, and how individuals shape, understand and give meanings to their local space.
The coding matrix we created was derived from Jenks and Dempsey’s (2007) definition of neighbourhood as a socio-spatial unit comprising of spatial, functional and social elements. To give further detail to these broad notions we drew on a number of Galster’s (2001) attributes of neighbourhood to create more specific identifiers.
To highlight spatial-based attributes of neighbourhood-making (Feld and Basso, 1996; Jenks and Dempsey, 2007), we focused on material appropriations of space. In other words, were objects intentionally moved or placed in ways that created boundaries or encouraged human interactions to become less anonymous and more familiar or ‘neighbourly’? To inform our identification of place-making practices that speak to the establishment of the ‘functional’ aspect of neighbourhood, again, we drew on Jenks and Dempsey’s (2007) list of neighbourhood services, including: infrastructural characteristics such as roads, pavements; proximity characteristics such as access to services; and functional needs such as provision of food, shelter, health and education services. To classify neighbourhood-making practices that suggest the establishment of the social and interactive aspects of neighbourhood, we focused on events and the way people interacted at these events (social networks and the degree of socialisation). Here we also focused on sentimental characteristics, such as a commonly shared political identity and whether the activities and individual behaviours are acknowledged by others in the neighbourhoods.
Findings
In the following sections we present some of the performative practices observed during the Anti-ELAB movement that can be interpreted as defining movement-specific spatial and social boundaries and/or fulfilling the functional needs of protestors. Each practice may service more than one of the three core aspects of neighbourhood (and thus neighbourhood-making), however the practices have been grouped according to their primary function.
The social: Converting shopping malls into neighbourhood places
We turn first to the physical manifestation of ‘community networking’ and information sharing. Individuals engaged in the material appropriation of space by attaching information to pillars and placing it on the floors of the shopping mall atriums. The content of the information was mixed: some pages gave brief timelines of important recent events, others wrote of specific instances of police brutality and gave graphic photographic evidence, others still gave information about future protest events; dispersed between all of these were evocative images of Hong Kongers fighting for democracy or messages of support for the movement. Passers-by began to stop to read the information, eventually large congregations of people could be seen gathered around the pillars and atriums (see Figure 1). The information was only available for short periods of time – usually 3–4 hours during the evening rush hour – because the shopping mall security required it be removed by close of business. The placement and content of these material objects caused the usual patterns of human interaction to change. It had the effect of partitioning spaces within the shopping malls into ‘community noticeboards’ more akin to those found in community halls or residential complexes.
Flyers on display in a shopping mall.
During mask- and flyer-making events, citizens brought stools and stationery and sat together in the large atriums of shopping malls, making masks and flyers to be distributed at rallies scheduled for the following weekends. Memorial events were similar in that individuals came together to engage in traditional culturally based activities. Instead of making masks and flyers, people made paper cranes and laid them on the floor alongside white chrysanthemums. Paper cranes and white chrysanthemums symbolise not only peace-seeking but also remember the protestors who sacrificed their lives during the Anti-ELAB movement. At sing-in events, individuals brought instruments and boom boxes to the shopping malls and stood in the atriums and played Glory to Hong Kong. Across a five-month period, approximately 90 sing-in events took place across 18 districts of Hong Kong (see Figures 2–4).
Protestors gathered to sing songs in New Town Plaza, Shatin.
Map of ‘singing with you’ events.
‘Singing with you’ events (date and place).
The decision to protest in shopping malls was quite deliberate. During the earlier phase of the movement, protesting in shopping malls lowered the perceived risks (legal consequences) of participation in the movement as malls are ‘private spaces’ that law enforcement officials cannot enter without a warrant or the consent of the property owner. Each of these events was open for anyone to ‘participate’ in. Masks, scissors, pens and/or piles of origami paper were dotted across the floors, making them easily available to anyone wishing to stop and participate. Similarly, the lyrics and musical score of Glory to Hong Kong were made publicly available and have been widely circulated on the internet. All the events had an element of spontaneity, although sing-in events were perhaps the most organised in nature. Attendance was mobilised and coordinated through social media platforms such as Telegram and Facebook. At the specified time and place, thousands of people seemingly ‘materialised’ and occupied the space. Thus, these events also had the hallmarks of a ‘smart mob’ (Ting, 2020).
Bringing and placing privately owned items such as instruments, furniture and craft supplies not only constituted a material appropriation of space but a social appropriation of space. The shopping mall atriums became sites of more familiar interpersonal interaction as strangers began to stand side by side and sing, sometimes even holding hands, or sit down next to each other in spaces typically used as major thoroughfares and strike up conversations over manual tasks. Spatially, this had the effect of converting the shiny atriums of capitalism into ‘the neighbourhood commons’ where people came to socialise and engage in cultural activities together. The content and physical objects produced by these ‘cultural activities’ are also of significance as they gave physical form to ideological constructs. Socially, these practices became performances of solidarity that intentionally overlooked pre-existing differences in positionalities such as gender and class. An alternative imaginary came into existence (if only temporarily) through people getting to know each other while making things together or sharing lived experience. Thus, a collective ‘Hong Kong identity’ could be reinforced and replicated through practice and objects.
The functional: Networked food and shelter
In this section we focus on the new spatial and ideological linkages established between movement participants, food, shelter and health services during the Anti-ELAB movement. Several Apps were created during the months between June and December 2019 including Whatsgap, Eat With You and Hong Kong Shops. The Apps cover all districts of Hong Kong and were designed to connect ideologically like-minded consumers and retailers. The Apps use a simple colour-coding scheme to identify the political ideology of a retailer which are connected to Google maps (see Figure 5). A retailer appearing under a ‘blue’ banner is alleged to be in favour of closer political ties between Hong Kong and China, whereas a ‘yellow’ banner suggests the retailer is supportive of the protest movement. A ‘green’ banner denotes political neutrality or an ‘unconfirmed’ ideological stance. The categorisation of a retailer as either ‘blue’ or ‘yellow’ is done by consumers and can be based on official statements made by management or the individually held political attitudes of employees. The Eat With You App administrators claim to fact-check assertions made by users about the political stance of a retailer and permit retailers to challenge and correct the record. 3 Whatsgap also connects users to Facebook pages such as ‘Yellow Point’ 4 that list information about ‘yellow’ shops and propaganda collections on Instagram.
Map highlighting the locations of ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ shops.
Consuming in yellow-only shops emerged as a new and widely adopted protest strategy (Wan Chan and Pun, 2020). It also constituted a series of new material and social practices in the neighbourhoods. Store owners began to advertise their ‘yellow-ness’ in the physical world by putting flyers and propaganda sympathetic to the movement in clearly visible places such as entryways, at the cash register and in windows. ‘Yellow-ness’ became a marketable commodity. This commodification of yellow-ness supports Lefèbvre’s (1991) argument that actors inevitably become co-opted into the dominant social structures that define the spaces we live in.
Some stores started to provide additional ‘functional services’. These included providing places for shelter, the establishment of collection points for donations towards the movement and ‘pay-it-forward’ programmes where customers could pay the cost of a meal for protestors. As the ‘shopping with you’ movement gathered momentum, stores perceived as supporting the establishment were not only boycotted but, in some cases, physically damaged.
Groups on social media platforms such as Telegram and Facebook emerged to link people with places to shelter. During the protest, residents and shop owners in locations close to where protests typically took place, such as Mong Kok and Central, began advertising the availability of space for protestors to rest or work. The notices typically listed the space and utilities available, for example ‘room, first-aid, hot and cold water, wi-fi, phone-charging service, food’. They also listed the time during which these were available such as, ‘Available after 10 pm, passcode is XXX’. Other notices sought to mobilise and co-ordinate ‘service providers’– those with free space – by soliciting information on what services they could provide. The establishment of this network of shelters meant the adoption of new spatial and social practices in neighbourhoods. The network of shelters became known as ‘safe houses’ and ‘rest stops’. With reference to Chaskin’s (1997) construction of neighbourhoods as spaces connected to feelings of safety or threat, the naming of these rest stops as safe houses has a neighbourhood boundary-making effect by othering those not associated with the movement as threats or unsafe. Socially, it brought strangers together under roofs they would not otherwise have shared. Extending previously ‘private spaces’ to large numbers or a continuing stream of strangers spatially had the consequence of appropriating private spaces into pseudo public spaces. A defining element of who was permitted into these pseudo public spaces was the political ideology of the actors.
The digital establishment of ideological links between objects or ‘functional services’ distributed across space had the effect of creating an online neighbourhood, or a neighbourhood not entirely bounded in space and physical interactions between people. The fact that the ideological were actually rooted in space meant that new neighbourhood spaces were established that transcended the official district boundaries drawn by Hong Kong city planners. The digital and spatial representations of neighbourhood were mutually reinforcing. The group of retailers linked by specific political values and views of Hong Kong identity became known as the ‘yellow economic zone’ (Wan Chan and Pun, 2020). Yellow has become synonymous with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and references the US suffrage movement of the 1870s. This name signifies not only spatial boundaries but also political and ideological boundaries that indicate who is welcome (those sympathetic to the movement aims) and what code of behaviour applies.
The spatial: Encircling space and linking localities
In this section we focus on The Hong Kong Way – a performative act in space that created physical and ideological links and boundaries between places. On the 30th anniversary of the ‘The Baltic Way’, 5 Hong Kongers formed human chains that spanned approximately 35 miles (60 km) across Hong Kong. Strangers stood side-by-side, many held hands or linked arms while singing Glory to Hong Kong for 2 hours between 7 pm and 9 pm (see Figure 6). The human chain followed the route of three major subway lines. This practice not only gave human form to significant functional arteries of Hong Kong but more importantly it linked the districts of Hong Kong and redefined the borders between them. The human chain also ‘encircled’ Hong Kong’s downtown hub that straddles the opposing shores of Victoria harbour (see Figure 7), re-framing it or, in Lefèbvre’s terms, ‘reclaiming it’, as a new geo-political neighbourhood. It tied protestors and local residents together physically but also reinforced a shared ideology and collective identity across districts.
Human chain in the localities.
Map showing the route of the Hong Kong Way.
Discussion
Contentious politics in focus: Neighbourhood-making as claim-making
Socio-spatial concepts such as scale, relation and place-frames can be usefully employed to analyse the practices described above and provide insight into mobilisation and claim-making during the contentious politics of Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB movement.
Adopting a scale-based lens, focus is guided towards pre-existing jurisdictional boundaries and hierarchies such as the nested relationships of district, city and national governance. The replication of neighbourhood-making practices across all 18 districts of Hong Kong had the effect of linking diverse populations through space, time, action and ideology. These practices could be seen as important and effective ‘scale-jumping’ strategies. District-based differences were discarded in favour of a unified Hong Kong-based political, social and spatial unit. Demarcating ‘Hong Kong’ as not only the site of but also the unit of contest thrusts the claims of protestors into the national scale. Claims are recast as a geo-political manoeuvring between the people of Hong Kong and the leadership of the People’s Republic of China.
Taking a relational approach to analyse the contentious practices of the Anti-ELAB movement, the districts of Hong Kong as ‘immutable mobiles’ (Kim, 2019) come back into focus and the role inter-local networking practices, virtual space and modern ICTs have played in connecting these places and the actors in them are foregrounded. The digital platforms facilitated the networking of agents (protestors) and stretched contestations across ‘topological spatiality’ (Robinson, 2015) and thus prevented movement claims from being contained spatially in downtown Hong Kong. Moreover, the ideological linkages established between actors and places by apps such as Whatsgap and Eat With You facilitated the substitution of the hegemonic norms that normally divide these spatialities with an alternative agenda.
Finally, considering the findings with reference to Martin’s (2003a, 2003b) notion of place-frames, singing Glory to Hong Kong as a contentious performance in itself or while carrying out other neighbourhood-based contentious performances imbued action with political meaning and established physical and ideological boundaries between movement sympathisers and non-sympathisers. The lyrics of Glory to Hong Kong serve as an effective place-frame that outline the physical condition of the Hong Kong locality as well as the experiences and political desires of its ‘residents’. In this context, these neighbourhood-based actions and the objects they produced also became place-frames to demarcate an imagined ‘Hong Kong neighbourhood’ linked by civic ideals of cosmopolitanism, rule of law, and freedom of speech and association, as well as political aspirations for universal suffrage.
Spatiality in focus: Redefining the neighbourhood construct during contention
At the most superficial and descriptive level, each of the spatial and social practices explored above contested a conceived (Lefèbvre, 1991) or traditional meaning of space. Sites dominated by capital (shopping malls) were converted into neighbourhood commons thereby uniting strangers, protestors and residents of a locality. Spatial boundaries were redefined by ‘localising’ the scale and nature of human interactions that occurred in these spaces. The distinction between private and public space was re-imagined as strangers were welcomed into homes and shopping malls were occupied. Shopping malls and ‘safe houses’ were simultaneously conceived of as private spaces and public spaces. Existing all at once as an exclusive space beyond the reach of the establishment and the police and an inclusive space that anyone could enter for the purpose of protesting or going about their daily activities.
It can be argued that new neighbourhoods were formed during the Anti-ELAB protests both within and across the 18 districts of Hong Kong as the practices explored above occurred along three core lines – spatial, social and functional – along which the socio-spatial concept of neighbourhood has generally been founded. However, the trans-local and transient nature of these new neighbourhoods does not neatly align with the more traditional definition of neighbourhood as a locally contained, residentially based socio-spatial unit. As such, it is important to reconsider how we might understand the spatiality and social constitution of neighbourhood as a construct in the context of contentious politics.
Using space-centric understandings of neighbourhood, the practices observed above could be seen as redefining neighbourhood boundaries – council boundaries were discarded and new zonings were created by redefining connections between important functional attributes and services found in neighbourhoods such as food, shelter, medical care and cultural activities. In this instance, the connections between these functional services were no longer rooted in spatial proximities, rather they were linked by ideological affinity. Thus, with the help of ICTs, the geographic area and spatiality associated with neighbourhoods can be re-cast across significantly larger spaces.
Substituting the spatial linkages between the social and functional attributes of neighbourhood with ideological ones also challenges the conceived permanency of the materiality of neighbourhoods. Scholars (Galster, 2001; Martin, 2002, 2003a) assert neighbourhoods have a certain degree of permanency once physical attributes are established. In other words, the social attributes of a neighbourhood may change but functional elements may be more enduring because of the fixed and often embedded or networked nature of transport infrastructure, schools and hospitals. Our findings, however, suggest the inverse. The social networks founded on political ideology endure with the assistance of the digital-physical connections made between like-minded retailers and consumers through Apps. However, other functional aspects of the neighbourhoods we observed were transient, such as the provision of shelter, first aid, and spaces for cultural activity and exchange.
Looking at the spatial practices during the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB movement through the prism of the neighbourhood construct, it is possible to see that neighbourhoods can be drawn along ‘ideological’ lines 6 as well as spatial proximities. However, the question arises of how is an ‘ideological neighbourhood’ different from a networked group of politically like-minded individuals? Based on the Hong Kong case, we suggest that ‘ideological neighbourhoods’, like more traditionally founded neighbourhoods, are:
Spatially manifest. Ideological neighbourhoods can endure despite the quick dissolution of some functional and spatial elements but struggle to endure without any physical manifestation. Thus, ideological neighbourhoods must be spatially manifest in some way, whether it be through key functional elements such as food and shelter, or signs and symbols in shop fronts, public spaces and even items of clothing.
Socially manifest. There must be a distinct ‘community’ that inhabits this neighbourhood. The community can be real or imagined (Anderson, 1991).
Bounded. There are clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders; however, rather than these boundaries being space-based, they are ideologically based.
Unlike traditional conceptions of neighbourhood, ideological neighbourhoods are likely to be: (1) spread across larger geographic areas and transcend existing socio-spatial boundaries; (2) reliant on ICTs to connect people across these greater geographical distances; (3) reliant on a political opportunity structure that permits the gathering of people in space and freedom of speech; (4) functionally transient. The passage of the National Security Law 2020 has placed limitations on what people can do and say. As result, the spatial and social manifestations of the ideological neighbourhood that emerged during the Anti-ELAB movement have disappeared from view. It will be interesting to see whether this change in political opportunity structure encourages the establishment of a ‘digital neighbourhood’ (Anselin and Williams, 2016), as a means to continue the movement demands and to avoid detection by the government.
Conclusion
Focusing on the contentious practices that occurred in the neighbourhoods of Hong Kong during the 2019 Anti-ELAB movement, this article highlights neighbourhood as an important unit in the solidification of shared political ideologies and the mobilisation of people. We echo Forrest’s (2009) and Arampatzi’s (2017a, 2017b) claims that neighbourhood is an important unit that rebuilds social cohesion from the bottom up. The combination of activity along spatial, social and functional lines during the Anti-ELAB movement simultaneously established new neighbourhoods and articulated the claims and imaginaries of protestors.
We extend the literatures on contentious politics and urban sociology by showing that the ideology and the imaginaries of movement participants can become spatially manifest and thus abstractions become defensible in the physical world. We stress that spatial, functional and social attributes of neighbourhoods cannot be separated from each other but, in order for neighbourhoods to form, these elements do not necessarily need to be linked by spatial proximity as previous work has suggested. Instead, during times of political contention, neighbourhoods can be drawn along ideological lines that transcend more traditional spatial boundaries. Neighbourhood thereby not only encapsulates the intersection of space, social relations and sense of community but could also be a defensible ideological space.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank Hilary Yerbury for her comments and suggestions. We also thank Wai Ki (Ash) Wan for assisting with data collection and Wai Chung (Cyrus) Kwan for creating the data plot for this article. We appreciate the constructive feedback from the editor, Dr. Lazaros Karaliotas, and three anonymous reviewers.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
