Through the conceptual lens of Urban Political Ecology, understanding Hong Kong as a system comprised of myriad interconnected biophysical and socio-political flows has revealed the politicised circulations of water, air, waste, food and viruses, to reflect the complex dynamic power relations that underlie the city’s uneven urban landscape. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19…
Category: Hong Kong
COVID-19 and the City
Since the World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus a pandemic on 11 March 2020, there have been over 60million cases and 1.5million deaths worldwide. From the 2003 SARS pandemic to the 2009 H1N1 influenza, the rise of Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) epidemics have attracted scholarly attention as an ongoing phenomenon far from a series of…
A ‘Situated’ UPE of Food-Retail: Hong Kong’s Wet Markets
From water, to air, to sewerage, to waste, Urban Political Ecology (UPE)—derived from the Marxist understanding of capital accumulation as the primary driver of urbanism in the global North—has illuminated the processes through which biophysical entities are transformed by the social, cultural and political to codify Hong Kong’s uneven urban geographies (Keil, 2003). However, taking…
The ‘Cardboard Grannies’ in Hong Kong’s Waste Management Infrastructure
For the majority of HongKongers, ‘cardboard grannies’ have become part of the city’s landscape…normalised, disregarded and blatantly ignored. Shamefully removing my own sense of indifference, I have come to see their everyday lives as a striking display of the contested perceptions of value and power relations inherent in Hong Kong’s urban waste structure (Myers, 2005)….
From a Sewerage Perspective: The Missing 6.4% in Hong Kong’s Population
With two billion people worldwide lacking access to basic sanitation facilities like toilets or latrines, poor sanitation is an urgent concern that reduces overall human-wellbeing and hinders socio-economic growth (WHO, 2019). However, in the affluent city of Hong Kong, where 93.6% of the population are connected to an extensive underground public sewerage network that orchestrates…
Clean Air—A Basic Children Right
Resulting in an estimated seven million premature deaths every year, air pollution is a pressing global issue that has attracted increasing academic, government and popular attention in recent years. In 2013, the Hong Kong government launched the ‘Clean Air Plan,’ setting out a series of initiatives to reduce domestic, industrial and transport emissions. Since then,…
Colours of Hong Kong’s flood-mitigation infrastructure: Blue, green or grey?
On 16 September 2018, Hong Kong was hit by Typhoon Mangkhut—the strongest tropical cyclone in the city’s recorded history. The disaster interrupted electricity supply, paralysed transport and led to the collapse of a major sea wall. Direct losses and insurance claims totalled US$192million and US$107million respectively. As a subtropical, coastal city, Hong Kong’s chronic flood…
The Nature Story of Hong Kong
“Hong Kong is a city where the tranquillity of nature meets the heart of a thriving metropolis.” Hong Kong Tourism Board Indeed, Hong Kong’s landscape is formed by alternating layers of cityscape and mountainscape; and the city is well known for its numerous outdoor scenic trails. However, regardless of having grown up in such an…
The Urban Digest 