Editor’s Note: The recent “walking craze” has brought Hong Kong’s public housing estates into the local—and even international—spotlight in a new way, sparking a wave of aesthetic, nostalgic, and historical rediscovery through tours and cultural production. Yet the space most intimately tied to the everyday lives of public estate residents—the wet market—has not become a point of tourist focus, nor has it received equal attention in explorations of Hong Kong’s colonial modernity.
In her recent article published in Urban History, “Markets Made Modular: Constructing the Modern ‘Wet’ Market in Hong Kong’s Public Housing Estates, 1969–1975”, design historian Vivien Chan traces how modular wet markets were integrated into Hong Kong’s public housing estates between 1969 and 1975. This modular synthesis was not merely a matter of building efficiency; more importantly, it reflected the colonial government’s ideas about health, food hygiene, and social and spatial order—ideas that were continually redefined from the bottom up as consumers, neighbours, and hawkers made use of these spaces in their own ways.
“Wetness”, as a concept of materiality, sat at the centre of ongoing negotiations between government departments, architects, managers, and consumers, and serves as a point of entry for scholarly inquiry into market design. Chan’s research draws on government archives as well as embodied, on-site observation and investigation.
If we only think of colonial history from the perspective of the state, from the top-down, we will only ever receive the narrative that is played out through legitimised channels of information. These channels will only ever offer one side of the story, including the assumptions about what is “good” design, what works, what is aspirational, and what is the natural course of “progress”. For me, researching public housing should go beyond the point of design—a building only becomes ‘public’ once it is used, and with that, all the contradictions of life play out beyond the intentions of the architect, the policy maker, or the state.
What inspired you to focus on the modular market structures in Hong Kong’s public housing estates, specifically in the 1960s and 1970s, as a lens to examine colonial modernity and everyday negotiations of modernity?
The article came from part of my PhD thesis on consumption spaces in Hong Kong New Towns public housing estates from the 1950s onwards. Given the interest in public housing estates and wet markets respectively, I was surprised that there was little consideration for their relationship to each other, in spite of markets featuring significantly in estates and the everyday lives of people. If we are considering public housing as a core facet of Hong Kong’s story of colonial modernity, why would the market not also be part of that construction?
Growing up, the market space was a significant place in my memory of Hong Kong—I was born in the UK, and so markets were meaningful spaces for me to experience everyday rhythms in Hong Kong, as well as a space that demonstrated similarities and differences to the markets I encountered at home. I’ve always enjoyed markets as a space to engage in senses, language, food, and the body, and you can learn a lot about where you are and your relationship to a place through visiting a market. Of course, wet markets were, and continue to be, significant spaces for a vast majority of people in Hong Kong for the way in which we can connect ourselves socially and culturally to the environments we live in. In that way, I felt it was important to try to unpack what a “wet market” means historically beyond a space of nostalgia and try to consider how people have shaped the space, and therefore their own relationships to modernity, as well as the physical “shape” of the market itself.
Could you share some insights into your research process for the article? For example, how did archival materials, photographs, or government documents shape your understanding of modular markets and their role in public housing estates?
As a design historian, my research combines textual, visual-material, and spatial approaches to markets. I mostly used government documentation, including plans, photographs, and documents, but it was also important for me to directly engage with the sites I was interested in, even if they are not as they once were; Luckily this meant I got to visit a lot of estates and markets, photograph and film them, and talk to different people about how these spaces functioned for them now and in the past. Understanding the sense of movement and scale in and around these spaces enables me to contextualise the histories I’m trying to draw out of the archival material. I have found that this embodied experience of the subject opens more possibilities in the archive. I think of these ethnographies as a kind of archive as well, where I’m building a sense of these spaces over time, in the way that all research requires a collating and consolidating of experiences. In many ways the city itself can be seen as an archive, buildings age, transform, and respond to what happens in and around them.
You can extend this perspective into what constitutes an archive. If we look hard enough, there is in fact a vast, rich material archive of Hong Kong, which cannot be said for all previous colonies. For me, I would say it’s less about what is or is not there in the archive, but more about how I approach it. So, for example, the government photographs from the Information Service Department I used for this research are not technically held within a government archive, but in treating the material and the facilities as such, it allows for the photographs to be enriched by the process of making these “archives” —knowing that these photographs were used to document these spaces for specific purposes, some published and others rejected, reframes them as serving particular points of view. Then you can begin to unravel other perspectives. How might a photograph on one hand, be a tool for promotion, surveillance, or evidence for the colonial government, but on the other, become a fragment of an experience, negotiation, or everyday resistance by the people?
Reading the material in this way really helped to reframe my thinking around the market. Complaints become self-advocacy, discussions become experimentation and negotiation, obstruction becomes occupation and taking ownership of a life and space within the estate.
What impact do you hope your research on modular markets and public housing estates will have on the broader academic discourse about colonial urbanism, design history, or the socio-spatial dynamics of consumption in Hong Kong?
I think about my research on consumption spaces as part of a wider movement towards more diverse histories of Hong Kong. Alongside my own research, I am also a co-founder of two research collectives related to Hong Kong design history and design research in Asia more broadly, Hong Kong Design History Network and astra*. Currently, I am working on a project on grassroots design archives in Asia, and another developing historiographies and speculative histories of Hong Kong design. Collaborative research is an integral part of the way I work, and I hope that my research can instigate more dynamic conversations on how histories of Hong Kong can relate to a network of global colonial and postcolonial histories. I find a lot of transdisciplinary potential in fields like design history, where research on Hong Kong could be a unique angle on, for example, global histories of manufacturing, urban design experimentation, cross-regional design exchange and the everyday politics of design. If my research inspires more collective, collaborative ways of producing knowledge, about consumption, design, spatial history, or anything related to Hong Kong’s material culture, then I would already be incredibly humbled.
In terms of scholarship, I hope that my research might encourage more experimentation with research material and theoretical approaches to Hong Kong’s history. I would love to see Hong Kong’s history be more readily articulated through material culture, and a willingness to go beyond relating Hong Kong to political dichotomies of Britain and China to explore more explicit relationships with Southeast Asia, and the diaspora around the world. These are aspects I am observing in a new generation of scholars who are seeking to elaborate on Hong Kong’s cultural landscape with more complexity and depth, as well as picking up experiments in history-writing from the 1980s and 1990s which have fallen by the wayside. It is moving to see people actively take time and space to imagine new ways to expand Hong Kong history beyond the confines of what we have understood it to be until now.
What drew you to public housing as a central focus of your academic work? How do you see the study of public housing contributing to a deeper understanding of Hong Kong’s colonial history and urban development?
I was drawn to public housing because of my own family history, in an attempt to get to know the experiences of my parents and grandparents in a time of enormous transformation. I wanted to connect my spatial understanding to theirs and find connection between our intergenerational relationships to Hong Kong. My own subjectivity as Hong Kong diaspora has greatly influenced what and how I research. At the beginning, being an outsider felt like a disadvantage, but in embracing this position, I hope to ask questions that seem obvious but may have been overlooked by someone who has grown up surrounded by these spaces. I think of my approach as offering different elaborations on everyday experiences, which might help others to stop and think more critically about Hong Kong’s colonial modernity in the past and the present. In the meantime, it has allowed me to identify myself as a Hongkonger and start to see all the diverse understandings of such an identity with all its contexts, problems, and possibilities. I’m sure for many researchers of Hong Kong, the 2019 protests were incredibly impactful. Being in Hong Kong during those years and witnessing the way the city was changing in real time, put so much of my research approach into perspective.
Focusing on public housing to me means focusing on the minutiae of the spaces we live in. If we only think of colonial history from the perspective of the state, from the top-down, we will only ever receive the narrative that is played out through legitimised channels of information. These channels will only ever offer one side of the story, including the assumptions about what is “good” design, what works, what is aspirational, and what is the natural course of “progress”. For me, researching public housing should go beyond the point of design—a building only becomes “public” once it is used, and with that, all the contradictions of life play out beyond the intentions of the architect, the policy maker, or the state. What happens when we focus on history of activities around the “illegal” hawker in a public housing estate, rather than the history of hawker suppression? What more can be drawn from asking what makes the market “wet”, is it just about “wet floors”, or can it be about the way that various stakeholders negotiate ideas of food, space and environment? These might seem like small, arbitrary adjustments, but I think it’s an important distinction to make when we talk about accessing histories that are our own rather than the ones dictated to us.
How do you envision extending your research on public housing and markets into a long-term academic project? Are there specific themes, methodologies, or comparative studies you’re interested in exploring further?
Currently I’m working on a project on “wet spaces” which draws from my research on wet markets, as part of my role as an Asia in the World Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden. I hope to develop a research “toolkit” where materialities such as “wetness” can be points of connection for inter-regional spatial historical narratives. Naturally this has led to some exciting conversations for collaboration across time frames and geographies. I’m particularly excited by comparative studies with Southeast Asian consumption spaces, and have had invigorating conversations with scholars from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. I’m keen to be able to share more methodologies which do not always make it into an academic journal format, and I think that consumption spaces and public housing are topics that are ripe for experimenting with methodologies and approaches.
Actually, my next step is to find the right outlet for my longer research on Hong Kong hawkers and itinerance. Recently, as part of my previous editorial fellowship at History Workshop, I developed a series on itinerance inspired by hawkers, which sparked so many new ideas about what, how and why we research, and indeed how to continue to research as academia becomes more precarious and competitive rather than collaborative. Part of this initiative has been to develop a research lab of my own, which draws on my background as a design practitioner and educator. You could say that I’m interested in research “in motion”. So I hope that I can continue my research on markets and public housing in new ways, not only in formal academic contexts.
In what ways do you think the historical narratives of public housing and market spaces in Hong Kong inform or resonate with the current challenges and debates surrounding housing, urban redevelopment, and market spaces in the city?
Markets and housing have always been at the centre of contestations from the beginning of Hong Kong’s history; I think this tells us a lot about how these spaces factor in everyday life and the social, cultural and political impacts they have. These histories continue in today’s context, and it is important that we consider them as part of a much longer trajectory of struggle, resistance and negotiation. What I am also trying to say in my research is that the people have had agency in history, it is not a purely a story of colonial success or failure. The same can be said for the way we talk about the current challenges in society— “design” is too often framed as a solution to social issues, but it is often wielded as a tool in service of power and capital. The definition of design as a tool of the state is not unjustified, and we can see it in the landscape of Hong Kong. We are in another moment of rapid transformation, and it can feel like an impossible task to counter the speed of change. But I hope the historical narratives of the past can show that within these struggles there are other stories to be told. We might not be able to “design” our way out, but I do believe design history to be a useful lens and critical tool to understand social and cultural relationships to ourselves, our communities, and where we live. Doing so helps to equip us not only with practical design “skills” but with histories and legacies to inform our actions and approaches.
The histories of markets and public housing are ultimately about the use of land. The way the land is imagined, carved out, distributed and narrated are all things that, as a public, we should be cognizant of. I think that public housing and markets are places we can really face this at close proximity—how we engage with the environment, with our bodies, with the community, can be felt and played out in the groceries we have access to, the food we cook and eat, how we “make” our homes and families, the people we encounter, and through languages in exchange. Taking notice of the way these interactions take place helps to situate ourselves in a longer spatial history and enable ourselves to think about our past, present, and future more critically. It’s heart-warming to see that one of the responses to the immense change in the city since 2014 has been to take more interest in public history, histories outside of the academy and embedded in the community, particularly related to land. I hope that the histories of markets and public housing resonate with our capacity for flexibility, imagination, and the diverse ways we can resist.
Epilogue
Since conducting this interview, the tragic fire at Wang Fuk Court, Tai Po took the lives of 160 people and injured 79 people, including Fire Services, Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers, and construction workers. Histories of public housing and hawkers in Hong Kong are not only related to wetness, but also entangled with histories of fire. In writing and researching these histories, we have to understand how fire has been used to justify control and surveillance in the public realm.
We must resist simplifying the narrative of tragedies such as the Wang Fuk Court fire, and the tragic fires that took place in public housing in history. We have a duty to articulate these histories with care, sensitivity and complexity.