BOOKS 477 Notes 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: “The Disenchantment of the World,” “The Sense of Honour,” “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor‐ Network‐Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2. The “noumenal” here refers to German phi- losopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) theory of knowledge distinguishing “the thing in itself” (a Platonic idea or form existing in an external realm undisturbed by subjective appearances), as opposed to the phenomenal, “the thing for me” (subjectivity). Cecilia L. Chu Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City London: Routledge, 2022, 240 pp., 137 b/w illus. $110 (cloth), ISBN 9781138344655 There is perhaps no site of greater social contestation in Hong Kong’s urban history than that of land, housing, and specula- tive development. Cecilia L. Chu’s book Building Colonial Hong Kong is among the most careful works to date to tackle the city’s building growth from the 1840s to the 1920s. Chu constructs a dense, sus- tained argument based on painstaking research. As she states in her preface, her aim is to explore the seldom-considered yet “intricate relationship between architec- tural production and the economy,” where geographic context and urban change play integral parts (ix). In doing so, she takes a necessarily nuanced approach to exam- ining the complex and interdependent relationships among the government, the landlord class, and the tenants of the col- ony, as well as their conficts through cap- italism and the built environment. Hong Kong’s urban history has often been con- sidered through material, typological, and spatial analyses—for example, in recent years, by Barrie Shelton et al., Lee Ho Yin, and Charlie Xue—or through “softer” spa- tial urban and regional analyses along cul- tural, political, and economic lines. 1 The latter approach stretches further back to the likes of Dafydd Emrys Evans, Roger Bristow, Patrick Hase, and Elizabeth Sinn. 2 Chu’s book occupies a position between these two methods. As the title suggests, planning control and laissez-faire urban development—a condition the author describes as “specu- lative urbanism” (2)—played out con- tinually in dynamic contradiction. The government’s desire to encourage high levels of speculative property investment inevitably led to soaring property prices and high rents. In turn, Europeans pressed the government for regulatory protec- tion as their hold on land and property diminished. However, policies enacted to create European enclaves (such as Mid-Levels, and later The Peak) proved to be unsustainable, as the resulting neigh- borhoods could not escape infltration by the Chinese investor class. Meanwhile, the majority renter classes, principally also Chinese, inhabited long, thin build- ing units known as tong lau houses—the extreme outcomes of the dividing of plots of land. Such houses were then often sub- divided, with little thought to sanitary provisions, light, or ventilation. Regarding these living conditions, Chinese landlords, many conveniently aligned with the colo- nial government, defended the housing as serving “universal needs,” invoking the principles of Western liberalism, or as the consequence of “cultural difference,” depending on what best suited their inter- ests (72). Chu charts these bewildering oscillations of alliance and opposition with care. For example, in the late 1870s, such landlords—affrming European prej- udices—collectively petitioned against regulations that would call for the uni- versal and perceived costly provision of increased light, air, and water supply to their subdivided properties. The owners argued that these present conditions were “the outcome of a lengthened experience among the Chinese living in large and crowded cities” (62). Later, however, when policymakers advanced these sanitary reg- ulations, while accommodating landlords’ fnancial concerns, enwrapping these pro- visions within a new moralizing and an environmental determinism, such cultural claims to difference fell away (88–92). Racism and race identity played a particularly interwoven role that Chu balances attentively against class and affu- ence markers, observing with dry cyni- cism the convenient alignments between Chinese and European elites at several moments. Above these turned a remorse- less wheel of speculation, one in which every futile act of European propertied hegemony was subject to the relentless infiltration of Chinese capital. In this light, the urban expansion of Hong Kong into segregated parcels was dogged by the inevitable reality of a racially interblended property market. But what about the experiences of those living in the poor- est tenements? The author acknowledges that from the frst several decades, there are “very few frst-hand accounts of the views and experiences of these people,” except by way of elite sources such as offcials’ reports and newspaper accounts (63). It is only at the close of the book, in her discussion of the 1920s—an era of burgeoning trade unionism and emerging class consciousness—that Chu is able to rely on a broader variety of sources. The book is divided into six chapters that develop chronologically and themati- cally. In general, the short subchapters are well framed and interconnected. Chu not only provides plentiful and useful illustra- tions but also includes helpful maps and building plans to clarify and support the textual content. This wealth of images could have served an even greater eviden- tiary purpose if the author had offered a deeper descriptive and comparative analy- sis, with visual and material aspects of the city more evocatively considered. Chapter 2 takes us from the early 1840s to the late 1880s, quickly reveal- ing an inherent paradox that was colonial Hong Kong. A small, stable number of Europeans governed a settlement com- prising a rapidly growing population of Chinese, compelling the administration to balance revenue-generating needs through land speculation with its political goals of protectionism and planned segrega- tion. Landownership encouraged the frst Chinese to challenge European political hegemony, and the landlord class trans- formed into an increasingly astute force capable of petitioning through various registers. Chapter 3 concentrates on Tai Ping Shan and the pathology of tong lau hous- ing. This dense Chinese district, regarded as the locus for the 1894 bubonic plague outbreak, offers a singular case study of san- itary reform. Chu spatializes the textual evi- dence, memorably through the mapping of property deeds using rate collection books produced just before government control resumed. This method reveals a surprising tapestry of both interracial and individual– corporate ownership (fgs. 3.16 and 3.18). Chapters 4 and 5 chart the rapid expansion of Hong Kong urbanism and Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jsah/article-pdf/82/4/477/800744/jsah_82_4_477.pdf by SAH Member Access user on 01 January 2024