Cecilia L . Chu
Cecilia L. Chu is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as an urban historian with a background in design and conservation, Chu’s research and teaching focus on the social and cultural processes that shape the forms and meanings of built environments and their impacts on local communities, particularly in Asia. Informing her work is an interest in the design and representation of spaces (as buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures) and the production of their social meanings and values. She is especially interested in the intersection of professional and popular knowledge of architecture and landscapes and how these articulations have contributed to city-making and the shaping of collective aspirations of citizens.
Chu is the author of the award-winning book, Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning Society Book Prize. Her other publications include The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022), and Hong Kong Built Heritage (forthcoming 2024). Her current research projects include an investigation of the socio-technical histories of infrastructure in Hong Kong, as well as a comparative study of heritage and conservation practices in Asia that have given rise to new interpretations of colonial histories.
Chu is a co-founder and past president of the Hong Kong Chapter of Docomomo (International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement). She also serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Urban History, Journal for the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, Built Environment, Surveying and Built Environment, and the ArchAsia series of the Hong Kong University Press.
Address: School of Architecture
Rm. 406, Lee Shau Kee Architecture Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, NT, Hong Kong
Chu is the author of the award-winning book, Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning Society Book Prize. Her other publications include The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022), and Hong Kong Built Heritage (forthcoming 2024). Her current research projects include an investigation of the socio-technical histories of infrastructure in Hong Kong, as well as a comparative study of heritage and conservation practices in Asia that have given rise to new interpretations of colonial histories.
Chu is a co-founder and past president of the Hong Kong Chapter of Docomomo (International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement). She also serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Urban History, Journal for the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, Built Environment, Surveying and Built Environment, and the ArchAsia series of the Hong Kong University Press.
Address: School of Architecture
Rm. 406, Lee Shau Kee Architecture Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, NT, Hong Kong
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Books by Cecilia L . Chu
Planning, History and Environment Series, Routledge (2022)
ISBN 9781138344655
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation.
In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.
Edited by Cecilia L. Chu and Shenjing He.
University of Toronto Press (2022)
The Speculative City explores property speculation as a key aspect of financialization and its role in reshaping the contemporary built environment. The book offers a series of case studies that encompass a range of cities whose urban fabrics have undergone significant transformation in recent years.
While the forms of these developments shared many similarities, their trajectories and social outcomes were contingent upon existing planning and policy frameworks and the historical roles assumed by the state and the private sector in housing and welfare provision. By paying close attention to the forces and actors involved in property development, this book underscores that the built environment has played an integral part in the shaping of new values and collective aspirations while facilitating the spread of financial logics in urban governance. It also shows that these dynamics represent a larger shift of politics and culture in the ongoing production of urban space and prompts reflections on future trajectories of finance-led property speculation.
Papers by Cecilia L . Chu
Recent scholarship delves into concrete’s complex history and impact. It has been both a symbol of political power and a marker of social and environmental challenges. Ethnographic studies reveal its significance from local to global scales, shedding light on its unexpected implications.
Concrete’s material agency, highlighted in various studies, challenges assumptions of stability and strength. Its enormous carbon footprint contributes to climate change concerns. While alternatives like “aircrete” are explored, concrete remains the dominant building material for now.
Critical literature emphasizes concrete’s contradictions and potentialities, spanning diverse geographies and histories. Papers in this special issue explore concrete’s social, technical, and political entanglements worldwide. They analyze its role in shaping built environments, economies, and communities, while addressing sustainability challenges in the twenty-first century.
https://roadsides.net/collection-no-011/
歷史上大規模瘟疫常被描述為單一災難性事件。但若細讀歷史會發現，瘟疫也是揭示社會變革動力與當地權力關係的窗口。今日我們會想像未來的歷史將會如何書寫2020年新冠病毒疫情的故事，當下或是適當時機去重新檢視一個世紀前香港另一場大瘟疫對後世的影響。1894年爆發的鼠疫造成超過二千人死亡，並促成位於太平山區的香港首個大型都市重建計劃。該計劃常被視為政府為改善城市衛生及市民健康及所作長遠規劃的決定性第一步，然而這並非一個良政善治的成功故事。本文通過追溯計劃過程中鮮為人知的改變與互動，闡釋城市發展當中的內部邏輯，其後續影響在之後的一個世紀持續地塑造了香港的城市形態與規則。
Infrastructure Imagination: Hong Kong City Futures 1972-1988 is a recent public exhibition held at Hong Kong’s City Gallery in 2018. The exhibition showcases major infrastructure schemes completed in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “golden age of construction”, which saw unprecedented urban transformation in the territory. Photographs featured in the exhibition are the work of Heather Coulson, a leading construction photographer who specializes in large-scale engineering and industrial projects. In this short essay, the two curators, Dorothy Tang and Cecilia Chu, reflect on the roles and meanings of infrastructure and its relationship with landscapes in the Hong Kong context, as well as the significance of construction photography in exposing these relationships.
Exhibition: https://infrastructureimagination.splashthat.com
Videos: https://uvision.hku.hk/playvideo.php?mid=21924
this paper attempts to elucidate this ‘‘success’’ story by revealing the inherent conflicts between different stakeholders, and how these narratives nevertheless share and sustain a number of long-held myths about Hong Kong’s economy and housing market. It argues that these myths obscure the ongoing political choices of an interventionist administration, which maintains legitimacy by tightly controlling urban development and securing support from powerful economic actors. By connecting the various claims of the present case with historic discourses of the territory, the paper aims to shed light on the power relations embedded in the development policies that characterized Hong Kong over the colonial period, and which continues to shape the practices of housing in the present.
Planning, History and Environment Series, Routledge (2022)
ISBN 9781138344655
In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation.
In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.
Edited by Cecilia L. Chu and Shenjing He.
University of Toronto Press (2022)
The Speculative City explores property speculation as a key aspect of financialization and its role in reshaping the contemporary built environment. The book offers a series of case studies that encompass a range of cities whose urban fabrics have undergone significant transformation in recent years.
While the forms of these developments shared many similarities, their trajectories and social outcomes were contingent upon existing planning and policy frameworks and the historical roles assumed by the state and the private sector in housing and welfare provision. By paying close attention to the forces and actors involved in property development, this book underscores that the built environment has played an integral part in the shaping of new values and collective aspirations while facilitating the spread of financial logics in urban governance. It also shows that these dynamics represent a larger shift of politics and culture in the ongoing production of urban space and prompts reflections on future trajectories of finance-led property speculation.
Recent scholarship delves into concrete’s complex history and impact. It has been both a symbol of political power and a marker of social and environmental challenges. Ethnographic studies reveal its significance from local to global scales, shedding light on its unexpected implications.
Concrete’s material agency, highlighted in various studies, challenges assumptions of stability and strength. Its enormous carbon footprint contributes to climate change concerns. While alternatives like “aircrete” are explored, concrete remains the dominant building material for now.
Critical literature emphasizes concrete’s contradictions and potentialities, spanning diverse geographies and histories. Papers in this special issue explore concrete’s social, technical, and political entanglements worldwide. They analyze its role in shaping built environments, economies, and communities, while addressing sustainability challenges in the twenty-first century.
https://roadsides.net/collection-no-011/
歷史上大規模瘟疫常被描述為單一災難性事件。但若細讀歷史會發現，瘟疫也是揭示社會變革動力與當地權力關係的窗口。今日我們會想像未來的歷史將會如何書寫2020年新冠病毒疫情的故事，當下或是適當時機去重新檢視一個世紀前香港另一場大瘟疫對後世的影響。1894年爆發的鼠疫造成超過二千人死亡，並促成位於太平山區的香港首個大型都市重建計劃。該計劃常被視為政府為改善城市衛生及市民健康及所作長遠規劃的決定性第一步，然而這並非一個良政善治的成功故事。本文通過追溯計劃過程中鮮為人知的改變與互動，闡釋城市發展當中的內部邏輯，其後續影響在之後的一個世紀持續地塑造了香港的城市形態與規則。
Infrastructure Imagination: Hong Kong City Futures 1972-1988 is a recent public exhibition held at Hong Kong’s City Gallery in 2018. The exhibition showcases major infrastructure schemes completed in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “golden age of construction”, which saw unprecedented urban transformation in the territory. Photographs featured in the exhibition are the work of Heather Coulson, a leading construction photographer who specializes in large-scale engineering and industrial projects. In this short essay, the two curators, Dorothy Tang and Cecilia Chu, reflect on the roles and meanings of infrastructure and its relationship with landscapes in the Hong Kong context, as well as the significance of construction photography in exposing these relationships.
Exhibition: https://infrastructureimagination.splashthat.com
Videos: https://uvision.hku.hk/playvideo.php?mid=21924
this paper attempts to elucidate this ‘‘success’’ story by revealing the inherent conflicts between different stakeholders, and how these narratives nevertheless share and sustain a number of long-held myths about Hong Kong’s economy and housing market. It argues that these myths obscure the ongoing political choices of an interventionist administration, which maintains legitimacy by tightly controlling urban development and securing support from powerful economic actors. By connecting the various claims of the present case with historic discourses of the territory, the paper aims to shed light on the power relations embedded in the development policies that characterized Hong Kong over the colonial period, and which continues to shape the practices of housing in the present.
ISBN-10 0824855418
Play spaces have historically functioned as temporary ideal worlds, not complete utopias but imagined perfect worlds in which people find momentary escape from everyday reality. Research on the histories of recreation in Europe and America has shown that the emergence of modernist “playscapes” in the early 20th century, such as amusement parks, expositions, theme parks and fun fairs, etc., was part and parcel of the advent of industrialization and concomitant social reform movements that sought to introduce new “free time” and collective leisure activities to the working class. While these processes helped generate new relations between work and leisure and gave new meanings to collective social life, some of these spaces also worked to reinforce existing social and cultural hierarchies and perpetuate social stratification. Meanwhile, the provision of recreational landscapes was incorporated into practices of planning, landscape architecture and real estate, where a multitude of experts, institutions and other agents participated in their development, with varied implications for the ongoing reshaping of urban forms as well as the connection between city centers and suburban territories.
Although developed under very different conditions, a variety of modernist recreational spaces emerged in major metropolises in East and Southeast Asia in the early and mid 20th century. Earlier examples include the pleasure gardens that flourished in the early 20th century and provided mass entertainment to Chinese audiences in Shanghai, the zoos and amusement parks constructed by private railway companies in Japan to facilitate suburban expansion, and the new spectator sports venues such as baseball fields in Taiwan and racecourses in other cities that were adapted from earlier colonial models. While these and other play spaces have been studied by historians, research to date has tended to approach them as discrete entities with little connection either with accelerating capitalist development in the region or with the larger networks of experts, entrepreneurs and other institutional players that participated in their conception and development. Papers in this session will explore the diverse agendas, strategies and transnational exchange of knowledge in the production of recreational landscapes in East and Southeast Asia from the 1900s up to the 1970s. Of particular interest are the changing roles of recreation and their impacts on spatial relations, the adaptation of foreign planning and design models and their implications for local urban forms, the commercialization of leisure and their links with new consumption practices, and the relations between formal and informal recreational spaces.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to the conference website between 1 June - 30 September 2015: eahn2016conference@gmail.com
For more information on the conference, please visit:
https://eahn2016conference.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/eahn-cfp_090715.pdf
This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the role of speculation in the current and ongoing reshaping of the urban environment. What is speculation, how has it been defined by scholars and practitioners of different disciplines? What agents are involved in speculative practices and who are the beneficiaries and losers in the speculative city? How has speculation changed the ways we value what exists in the present and what assumptions are associated with projected visions of the future? We posit that such questions are fundamental for understanding not only contested urban processes amidst accelerating capital accumulation in recent years, but also evolving paradigms of planning, architecture and urban design, which increasingly need to confront the growing tensions between the short-termism of capital and long legacy of the built environment. These dynamics all point to the primacy of speculation as a contested terrain of everyday struggle as well as emerging individual and collective aspirations.
Convenors:
Cecilia Chu, Department of Urban Planning and Design, HKU
Natalia Echeverri, Department of Architecture, HKU
Eunice Seng, Department of Architecture, HKU
The exhibition is divided into four sections: 1) Mass Transit Railway, 2) Highways & Tunnels, 3) Electricity Networks, and 4) Water Works. Each section consists of displays of large-format photographs as well as scaled drawings that illustrate the physical configurations of selected projects. These are supplemented with video footage and archival records that document the construction boom in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s.
A revisit of projects initiated in this period offers and excellent opportunity to reflect on what has been known as the golden age of construction in Hong Kong and to envision ways for building a more sustainable future in the 21st century.