Hong Kong on display: Things, time and urban space

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Anneke Coppoolse

Despite, and due to, its culture of consuming ‘the new’, Hong Kong contains an expansive second-hand world that encourages preoccupation with the past through pre-owned ‘things’ and related practices of displaying and collecting. This article takes on a visual approach to understanding (fragments of) Hong Kong’s urban condition by considering its second-hand world. Following an established tradition of revaluing second-hand objects (economically and otherwise), the sites where these objects are temporarily ‘exhibited’ form stages for the emergence of stories about the city, through practices of exchanging, collecting and displaying. Focusing on a selection of these objects, displayed in particular locations, an attempt is made at understanding the significance of their persistence in Hong Kong.

Menotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Vitkauskaitė

The article analyzes urban representations of Soviet-era Lithuanian cinema. Like any other object of reality, the city in cinema is a secondary reality, the fruit of artistic interpretation. At the same time, images of the city in film can reflect individual and collective consciousness of the period. The analysis of urban space of Lithuanian feature cinema reveals that cinematographic space can be treated as a composite construct, which creates and represents projections of identities and feelings, reflects demands, ideas, cinema fashions of its time and “hides” real sociocultural and sociopolitical discourses. Most of Soviet-style feature films much easier incorporate countryside spaces, images, landscapes and lifestyle. Meanwhile the city often not only creates an impression of a claustrophobic space, but even looks very decorative. It seems that most of filmmakers can’t identify cities with their own, Lithuanian, national living space. In search of identity or inspiration they turn to idealized village, agrarian culture and its images. Therefore, the city of Soviet Lithuanian cinema is more likely to become a space of collapsed hopes, prison, ideological repressive space, which is stuck between the present and the past. Filmmakers, like their characters, run to the shelter of nature, the mythologized, well-decorated farmstead, where archetypal father and mother figures or a calm, meditative landscape await. It seems that movie characters (and filmmakers), who have escaped from the socialist reality and its challenges to the landscapes of nature and village, have never returned.


Author(s):  
Valentyna Bohatyrets ◽  
Liubov Melnychuk

Nowadays, in the age of massive spatial transformations in the built environment, cities witness a new type of development, different in size, scale and momentum that has been thriving since late 20th century. Diverse transformation of historic cities under modernisation has led to concerns in terms of the space and time continuity disintegration and the preservation of historic cities. In a similar approach, we can state that city and city space do not only consist of present, they also consist of the past; they include the transformations, relations, values, struggles and tensions of the past. As it could be defined, space is the history itself. Currently, we would like to display how Chernivtsi cultural and architectural heritage is perceived and maintained in the course of its evolution. Noteworthy, Chernivtsi city is speculated a condensed human existence and vibes, with public urban space and its ascriptions are its historical archives and sacred memory. Throughout the history, CHERNIVTSI’s urban landscape has changed, while preserving its unique and distinctive spirit of diversity, multifacetedness and tolerance. The city squares of the Austrian, Romanian and Soviet epochs were crammed with statuary of royal elites and air of aristocracy, soviet leaders and a shade of patriotic obsession, symbolic animals and sacred piety – that eventually shaped its unique “Bukovynian supranational identity”. Keywords: Chernivtsi, cultural memory, memory studies, monuments, squares, identity.


Author(s):  
Samuel Medayese ◽  
Hangwelani Hope Magidimisha-Chipungu ◽  
Ayobami Abayomi Popoola ◽  
Lovemore Chipungu ◽  
Bamiji Michael Adeleye

This study followed a chronological review of literature over the past 20 years. This was able to show relationship between inclusivity and physical development. A variety of discussions were looked into including dimension of inclusivity, definition of inclusivity, scales for measurement of inclusivity, methodology for appraising inclusivity, protagonists of inclusivity, and antagonists of inclusivity. The intricacy of the correlations between inclusive physical development and life expectations of residents are improved upon so as to show the similarities of these parameters. The analysis of the relevant literature indicated the process of enhancing the urban space and ensuring that all interest and strata of groups in the human composition are adequately cared for by employing the best parameters from the conceptualization of the city development, all the indicators of inclusiveness are well thought out.


2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coniam ◽  
Peter Falvey

The perception of falling standards in education, and in second language teaching in particular, has been a constant refrain for the past 20 years as changing needs and practices affect economic processes and manpower requirements. Within this context, this article deals with the establishment of language standards (‘benchmarks’) for teachers of English in Hong Kong. The article deals with two separate but linked notions: first, the notion of which model of the English language should be used as the standard model for English language teacher benchmark assessment in Hong Kong; second, the level of language ability that will be decided upon in order to establish the proficiency standards expected of teachers of English. The article first describes the background to the setting of language standards for teachers of English in Hong Kong. It then examines the selection of and justification for the model of English selected as the ‘minimum standard’. The following section considers the level of language ability agreed upon as the standard that teachers of English need to attain. The article concludes with an examination of the extent to which the standards that have been agreed upon match the needs of the major stakeholders in the standard-setting process.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong K Lo ◽  
Siman Tang ◽  
David Z.W. Wang

Public transit services (PTS) improve mobility and accessibility, and reduce car dependence. It is ideal if PTS are financially sustainable, with affordable fares and expedient quality. The success of PTS on accessibility improvement can be reflected by their level of patronage: do travelers choose to use them in lieu of their private cars? PTS in Hong Kong are renowned for their quality and profitability, superbly addressing the accessibility need for the city; they carry over 90% of the 11 million daily trips. A comparison of the per capita train-car and bus-vehicle kilometer run of PTS in Hong Kong with those in London and Singapore, however, suggests that it is not purely the supply that affects the use or accessibility of PTS in Hong Kong. By tracing and analyzing the development of PTS in Hong Kong over the past two decades, we found evidence that the high level of accessibility on mass public transit in the territory can be attributed to the land use policy of developing compact, high-density township, accompanying transport policies of granting high priority to the development of mass transit facilities and providing ways to ensure the financial viability of privately operated PTS, especially the innovative approach of integrating the development of public transport facility and property so as to exploit their synergy. In this paper, we study and highlight elements that contribute to the development of high accessibility on mass public transit in Hong Kong.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 734-740
Author(s):  
Agata Bandrowska-Kaim ◽  
Marzenna Dębowska-Mróz ◽  
Renata Repeć

Understanding the specificity of communication behaviour of individual groups of participants of the transport system is one of the most important areas of interest of urban logistics. An important problem to be solved on this occasion is to indicate the most important factors and determinants that determine the manner of displacements. Determining how these conditions change depending on the age of people carrying out urban sprawl can be the starting point for the development of an appropriate organizational offer of the transport system in the city. One of the more numerous groups moving in cities are high school students and students. For this reason, the goal set for the implementation was to learn the specificity of communication behaviour of students and students. The decisive factors in the selection of displacements to and from school / university and other dis-placements performed in the urban space have been determined on the basis of a pilot survey carried out in Radom. The obtained results and their analysis are presented in this article.


Author(s):  
Veaceslav MIR

Cities have been almost completely unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. Urban history has known many epidemics and pandemics, and there are clear historical parallels between the 13th and 19th century plague pandemics and cholera epidemics and the 21th century COVID-19 pandemic, from an administrative point of view. However, the cities’ public administration did not take into account the experience of the cities of the past to be prepared for the future problems. This requires developing flexible pandemic strategies and focusing on the decentralization of urban space through an even distribution of population in the urban environment. The COVID-19 pandemic will change the city, as previous pandemics and epidemics did. Urbanism v.3.0. will emerge, combining a green vector of development and digital technologies to ensure the autonomy and sustainability of buildings, districts and cities. At the same time, the role of culture will increase, which will become an effective tool for consolidating the soft power of the city in order to attract new people as the opposition of nowadays trend for living in the countryside.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Chan

In the 1980s, as the end of the millennium approached, the production of nostalgia exploded all around the world. For Hong Kong, nostalgia became a reminder of the golden age that had transformed the city into one of the “Four Asian Tigers” in the decades following the end of the Second World War. While yearning for the better days of the past, Hong Kong coincidentally experienced destabilisation. As the rest of the world, especially the “baby boomers,” mourned the end of a productive era, Hong Kong locals were disturbed by the affirmation of the handover to China in 1997. In the context of these events, a creative rush to nostalgia in cultural manufacturing swept across the city. In the hope of highlighting the uniqueness of nostalgic production in Hong Kong, this study analyses two sets of TV commercials produced by local beverage company Vitasoy. Through the deconstruction of selected historical events, Vitasoy successfully reinvented its brand and, in contrast to general criticism of the concept, generated a positive connotation for nostalgia on the path towards Hong Kong's search for an identity.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 1087-1104
Author(s):  
Sonia Lam-Knott

Since the 2000s, Hong Kong has become inundated with retail centres, such that the territory is now known as ‘Mall City’, a condition now problematised by youth activists in the city. This article is interested in why these youths take issue with this form of urban development. By tracing the emergence of the contemporary consumerist landscape from the colonial era to the present, it is shown that the current manifestation and characteristics of Hong Kong’s brandscapes are the product of unequal power dynamics between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, estate developers and the Hong Kong citizenry in shaping the city. By bringing youth activist voices to the forefront through the use of ethnographic data, the discussion then examines youth activist accounts detailing the experiential dimensions of living in this consumerist landscape, noting the feelings of alienation and exploitation circulating within the vernacular domains of Hong Kong society. The article concludes by reviewing the different ways these youths have attempted to reconfigure their relationship with this brandscape, and thus challenge the control the HKSAR government and estate developers have over Hong Kong urban space.


Author(s):  
Johannes Parlindungan Siregar

The heritage of Yogyakarta is always situated in a dynamic urban environment. Heritage conservation has been challenged by a lack of understanding on the ideological process in the creation of meanings. This paper investigates the creation process of urban space that is currently appreciated as heritage. The paper uses the city of Yogyakarta as the case study because its uniqueness as a mix of traditional and colonial cities. The study uses the concept of meaning production to understand the association between the construction of urban space and ideological meanings. This concept corresponds to the creation of urban objects and the recognition of meanings in the society. This study uses data sourced from a literature study. As the result, the process of meaning production has demonstrated social and political forces in the construction of traditional and colonial buildings. Situation in the past demonstrates urban space as a tool of political hegemony of traditional court and colonialist. A different social milieu in the present day changes the conflicting ideologies into history. Therefore, the urban structure expresses political strategies of relevant authorities in proclaiming hegemony and regulating society. This study provides a basis for investigating the influence of ideologies on the meaning of heritage that corresponds to cultural significant.


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