“The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who won it back, and who now plans its future — these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.” Edward Said
For a city whose precise identity has long been a source of fascination, Eunice Seng’s latest book tells the story of the archipelago city of Victoria like a Cubist painting. It offers a multifaceted gaze of the city’s contested history through the lenses of maps, films, and architecture. With occasional cameo appearances of technology, utopia, and the codified rules that govern its skyline and subtopia operation. The book is peppered with quotes from Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City, but unlike Dung Kai-Cheung’s work which shuffles between history, theory, and fiction. Seng’s portraiture of Victoria is still in the process of making. Besides offering the answer to what-is, Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development also provide several how-tos in chapter 6, Manuals: Resistance in Praxis, authored by colleagues and students of Seng’s. Probing beneath the surface of the canvas, what supports the work seems to be a position grounded in this very contested moment that we are witnessing and living in.
Michel de Certeau wrote in The Practice of the Everyday, that the itinerary is distinguished from the map. While the itinerary refers to the individual movements through walking the city streets as a pedestrian, the map assumes the role of a totalizing and singular view. The reader will assume the role of the pedestrian, a flâneur, who is the idle, urban stroller. One who pauses almost as much as she moves wandering through the alleyway, composite buildings, and towers of Victoria.
In Maps: Territories of Contestation, we are shepherded through 16 episodes of maps narrating the maritime, trade, military, border, reclamation, development, and infrastructural histories of Hong Kong. Here we are reminded of the subjectivity and exclusivity embodied by the nature of map-making. The act of rendering the invisible visible comes with an implication that is beyond the geological or geographic, but political and economical. As Seng asserts: “Maps are compelling ways to convey cartographic information but they are also distortions of the reality they claim to represent. Insofar as they are used for reference and navigation, they can easily be used as a political and ideological instrument”.
In Noirs: The City, the Woman and Other Spaces, mid-century Hong Kong movies such as Black Rose (Hak Mui Gwai, 1965), Elevator Girl (Din Tai Neui Long, 1965), The Forsaken Love (Ching Cheun Mui Gwai, 1968), and The Arch (Dung Fu Yan, 1970) are explored for their evocative relationship and connection to Hong Kong’s recent history in domesticity, gender, and modernization during the turbulent period of the 1960s. A time remembered for the ideological contestation between the populist and the communist. The chapter concludes by highlighting the issues of the built-heritage. The disappearance of the cinema architecture which coincides with the fall of the Hong Kong film industry.
In chapters TOWERS: Technologies, Jardine House and Metropolitan Visions; and COMPOSITES: The City in a Building, Seng examines two prototypical topologies born out of the confined urban context and darlings to the city’s developers: the tall and the hybrid. The archetypes that exemplify the zeitgeist of the place. The chapters paint a picture of universal optimism that comes with the notion of “building the tallest” on one hand, on the other hand, dissecting the hybrid buildings of Chungking Mansion, Kiu Kwan Mansion as the ultimate “Downtown Athletic Club”, vis-a-vis Delirious New York, but also as the bastion of the rebel insurgents.
The book contains 6 chapters sandwiched in between a prologue and an epilogue, with a short addendum cataloging 85 public toilets in the Fragrant Harbour called Excursus: Mapping Toilet Architecture. These chapters are represented through a rich set of texts, drawings, illustrations, photos, diagrams, and manga-style pen and ink drawings. The writing is reminiscent of typical academic journals, however, occasionally, the narrative surprises the reader with a change in prose akin to a spy thriller. “A few weeks later, the raids of leftist stronghold Kiu Kwan Mansion and Metropole Building began at 6.40 am on 4 August. Police cordoned off Kings Road and Tong Shui Road nearby. Police landed on the rooftop of Kiu Kwan Mansion in helicopters from a British aircraft carrier.”
The book is by no means a comprehensive history of Hong Kong. In a Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze argues that the “nomad space is occupying without being counted; while striated space is counted in order to be occupied”. Seng’s Hong Kong takes place in the city, the counted space, supported by a powerful conglomerate of the financial incentive system and disciplinary mechanism. The nomad space, a.k.a. the Country Parks of Hong Kong, which accounts for over 30% of the Special Administrative Region’s territory exists outside of this wonderful book. It is a contested territory waiting to be exploited.
Writers survey the territory they wish to describe; they stitch together the seemingly disconnected elements in order to produce the narrative. These elements may include fragments of the other stories of people, places, images, rituals, and buildings derived from observations and research. The writing of this book began at the time of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, while the manuscript was completed 3 months before last year’s proposed Anti-Extradition Law was announced. The book’s arrival could not be more timely, wandering in the midst of contestation. The underlying narrative of the book, as put forth by Seng, is to argue for a space of contemplation on architecture’s and urbanism's creative potential to support an equitable and inclusive society.
A Review of Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development by Eunice Seng
書評《Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development》-- 維城輿圖
