Revisiting Public Housing in Hong Kong: Definition,Institution,and Development

Hong Kong’s public housing has always attracted interests from architects, planners, and policymakers. This interest has been ever since Manuel Castells, Lee Goh, and R. Yin-Wang Kwok published the seminal The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome. Considered the authority in urban sociology and city and regional planning, the authors delivered high praise to Hong Kong’s public housing program. In the book they argued that the large-scale public housing scheme, which to this day houses 40-50 percent of the city’s population, was integral to Hong Kong’s fast economic development. Refugees from Mainland China entered in large number into Hong Kong in the postwar era, many living in makeshift squatters around the city. As they wrote, the public housing provided shelter to them, transforming them into politically stable low-cost labor that built the city’s economy. ¹ Hong Kong has since been hailed as Asia’s economic miracle as one of the four Asian Tigers, with its public housing sector celebrated as strong alternatives to the much stigmatized and deteriorating public housing in Western countries such as the United States.

The importance of the topic since 1990 however does not explain the recent revival in its studies. After a long period of silence on this topic, three books on Hong Kong’s public housing have been published in separate efforts in the recent three years. The recently heightened discussions can only be explained as coincidental, even though the 2019 protests in the city meant that readers and publishers were more likely to look in the way of Hong Kong (the city’s dissent is touched on at least briefly by one of the books in question). Nonetheless, the authors have developed different reasons to (re)visit Hong Kong’s public housing, given their backgrounds and experiences with the city. For one, Rosman Wai is a veteran of the topic, as she channels three-decades of experience working as an architect of public housing. Compared to her previous manuscript, which was a rare, specialist history of Hong Kong’s early public housing typology, ² her recent book zooms out as a generalist history of design variations of public housing, from past to the very present, featuring clear and beautiful illustrations such as floor plans and photographs. On the other hand, Miles Glendinning is established for his comprehensive research on global modernist mass housing in relation to state power. ³ Coming out of his last encyclopedia, he dedicates this new book to Hong Kong’s public housing (with heavy references and comparisons to Singapore), which stands out as a curious episode of global mass housing and the state. The last co-author Alan Smart revisits the topic of Hong Kong housing with a historical methodology, after publishing widely on the topic with social findings in the past decades, including in his previous book The Shek Kip Mei Myth. ⁴ The reversion back to the topic is necessitated by administration documents released upon the expiration of confidentiality, through the Hong Kong archives’ 30-year rule for access. It is his aim to find corroborations between his decades-old social findings and recently unearthed archival findings. Despite the variegated lenses of the authors, it is undoubtable that topics on the city have garnered more attention since 2019. As Glendinning and others point out, (recent) dissent is very much entangled in the city’s housing provision and lack thereof, warranting a contemporary look at the topic. In addition, as political commentators argue, the Hong Kong postcolonial government has continued to rely on housing provision to mitigate resistances, evident in the upsurge of public housing following 2019, making the topic a synchronous one.

This review essay provides a cross-reading of these authors by asking common questions with their texts. First, what is the definition of “public” in public housing? How do the authors challenge, if at all, the givenness of the realm of the “public”? Which “public” or for whom is public housing built for? Second, this essay asks the origins and formative institution for public housing in Hong Kong. Several authors find the (re)establishment of Housing Authority (HA) in 1973, from its various predecessor organizations, important for public housing, but for different reasons. How is HA important, and why? Third, the authors have different visions for the progress of public housing, with various (dis)agreements with one another. What counts as progress in the history of public housing, and how can these visions be contested? Lastly, the essay wraps up by examining the stakes behind looking at this history in the present moment. It proceeds to ask the relevance of this history for readers of this journal who are in the fields of architecture and urbanism.

Definition: The Ontology of Public Housing

What in fact does the “public” in public housing mean in Hong Kong? This is a simple ontological question that the authors have different ways of answering. Wai provides a vague answer, as she includes housing not simply provided by the state, but instead those that are designed by it. She concerns housing where the state participates to a large extent the design and execution of. Early on in the book, she addresses housing that was to some extent provided by the state but were not in fact directly designed by it. These marginal housing provisions included the dormitories for foreign government employees, the Civil Servants’ Co-operative Building Societies, and other housing schemes by private organizations such as that by the Hong Kong Model Housing Society. In these schemes, the colonial government was indirectly involved or had a facilitating role in housing provision, such as through gifting land or charging land to housing operators at a discounted rate. They also include the temporary resettlement scheme through the Licensed Areas, which were the predecessor of the Temporary Housing Areas (THAs) and were used to house squatters displaced by natural disasters or developmentalist schemes. In them, the government did not design the resettlement houses but built basic infrastructural utilities (a sites-and-services approach), upon which the residents would build cottages (or with the help of philanthropic organizations). These undesigned schemes do not factor largely into Wai’s main rhetoric, which to her started in 1954 with the HA’s (until before its merger), and the Resettlement Department’s involvements. To her, government-designed housing only started when the HA and Resettlement Department became institutions where the experiences and techniques of public housing designers could be accumulated and substantially improved on.

Compared to Wai’s emphasis on housing that is designed, Glendinning’s focus is on housing that is permanent. Permanent housing is contrasted with “temporary and emergency accommodation” (p. xiii) that are the state’s afterthoughts and uncoordinated responses to imminent crises. He identifies these temporary types to originate in the 1945-53 period, when the state’s main objective toward the squatter problem was “containment.” Housing characteristic of this period featured “a wide range of physical and organizational solutions and agencies,” and could be grouped within the shorthand term “resettlement” (p. 13). Leadership of this period had “no interest in formulating any kind of coherent housing policy” (p. 4). Contrasted with the erratic nature of this periodized housing, his book instead places the central focus on government built, multi-story housing blocks under the “high-density, high-rise policy” (p. 28).

Rather than taking for granted what is “temporary,” Smart and Charles Fung argue that the category of temporality is in fact political and factored centrally in the resolution of geopolitics in Hong Kong. As they identify, the 1972 Housing Targets marked a significant shift in public housing policy, whereby it was determined that “eradication, mostly through resettlement, was the path finally adopted” for squatting in Hong Kong (p. 131). Despite the clear objective, the execution was contingent on the unsteady definition of temporality. To build permanent housing, squatters needed to be removed from the land they occupied. However, by removing squatters, the government was obliged to provide them with temporary housing, mostly in the THAs. At the same time, the production of THA sites took up government land, especially as they were of low-density and consumed land that would more efficiently be used for multi-story housing (p. 135). This dilemma of land use pitted temporary and permanent housing in tension rather than each existing as stable categories separate from one another. As Smart and Fung analyze, temporary housing became an obstacle to developing permanent housing. The proliferation of permanent housing was in fact contingent on the elimination of temporary housing, which competed for land resources from the government. As Glendinning admits, the distinction between temporary and permanent has never been stable. Particularly concerning the THAs, as they were originated from the 1951 Wakefield Report, they in fact extended through the 1960s to as late as 2001 in the New Territories, the rural outskirts of Hong Kong. Their extended inhabitation challenged the temporary-permanent divide as simply determined by the duration of use they were designed for.

Institution: Making of the Housing Authority

This section of the essay traces the making of the HA, which is widely attributed to the institution of public housing in Hong Kong. The authors’ views converge and diverge on this issue at the same time—while they collectively believe that HA is the seminal organization for public housing in Hong Kong, they have different reasons to believe so. Wai’s reason is closest to the conventional narrative. The well-repeated narrative attributes the stepping-up of HA production as a response to the 1967 riots in Hong Kong, which was a spillover movement of the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China against colonial rule. During the riots, Communist sympathizers criticized the dire living conditions in squatters and dilapidated resettlement estates as evidence of the British’s mismanagement of the city to mobilize anti-colonial protests. As Wai quotes administrator Jack Cater, the 1967 riots represented a watershed in Hong Kong’s social development, as the colonial government pivoted from the containment strategy through incoherent resettlement policies to viewing housing as part of social reform, spearheading a comprehensive public housing program. The expansion of public housing served to establish colonial legitimacy and co-opt resistant forces. With the Ten-Year Housing Plan and under the 1973 Housing Ordinance, the HA was adopted from its previous, small-scale operation to a centralized administration of all government housing programs, including the resettlement estates by the Resettlement Department, the former HA estates, and the Government Low-Cost Housing (GLCH) by Public Works Department, serving the sandwich class between the resettlement and HA clienteles. It was hoped that under the newly integrated HA, both the design and management of public housing would be elevated. Arguing from a design perspective, Wai in fact doubts that housing under the new HA was significantly different from previous housing types. She comments that the unit type with the balconies persisted from Resettlement to the Twin Towers, an early HA typology. To her, the unit designs were quite the same, despite that the units were arranged on a long corridor in the former and around the twin courtyards in the latter. She further recounts that the amenities in the Twin Towers were practically identical to the Mark VI resettlement, the latest resettlement block type. She describes the early HA and late resettlement estates as design variations of one another (p. 150).

While Glendinning concurs with Wai that design elements indeed migrated from resettlement, GLCH, or pre-merger HA blocks to post-merger HA blocks, Glendinning focuses more on the institutional history of a centralized housing organization to argue why the HA merger was a break rather than continuity from the past. According to his thorough archival research, he confirms that London deliberated on a “coordinating ‘authority’ . . . to bring these low-cost housing initiatives together” as early as 1950 (p. 15). The deliberation was in response to the bubbling squatter crisis, which raised the attention of London. At that time, low-cost housing either belonged to resettlement or GLCH, or those by the pre-merger HA. Glendinning stresses that HA designs were fundamentally different from resettlement, even though both were low-cost state housing. While resettlement aimed at “colonial containment and control” of the tenement poor, HA blocks were originally not built for the city’s poorest, but “white collar and some medium-income tenants.” The GLCH’s positioning as “instrument of welfare betterment” (p. 44), and its provision to families “self-containment” and a “home of their own” triumphed over the containment strategy of resettlement in the merger (p. 45). As a result, new HA inherited the separate cooking and toilet facilitates for each apartment, displacing the Resettlement’s shared kitchen and bathrooms block types. On top of improvement on housing amenities, new HA apartments were managed with the Octavia Hill formula, developed in the British council housing where apartments were, like new HA ones, self-contained.

In addition, Glendinning provides more nuances to the well-repeated narrative around HA. Geopolitically, the 1967 riots were not just the backdrop to the HA reform, but directly informed its merger. As he importantly notes, the resettlement estates, ridiculed in their dilapidated forms due to “a vicious spiral of neglect and low-level disorder” (p. 100), were “fierce hotbeds” of these riots. Not only that, but Resettlement Department estate offices were targeted for attacks while HA ones were unaffected (p. 99), citing the poor housing quality as prime drivers for the riots. This finding places the riots central to the urgency of HA reforms. With this information, the 1967 riots can be contextualized as a backlash to a housing crisis, while the colonial government’s 1970s public-sector reform was first and foremost a public housing reform. In this light, the unification of HA was a landmark event that consolidated a containment-to-welfare attitude toward housing, while housing reforms led the government’s overall suppression of anti-colonial sentiments.

Smart and Fung agree with Glendinning that the integration of low-cost housing options into HA was an important step for public housing, while they think the significance was due to the tensions between these two housing options and the implications of these tensions to the geopolitics of Hong Kong. As said, the 1973 merger combined the resettlement, GLCH, and other HA estates, into the “permanent public housing category” (p. 160). Like Glendinning, Smart and Fung emphasize the fundamental difference in concept between the two options. Resettlement tenants often were “obliged to move, often as a result of Government action” such as squatter clearance, while GLCH (managed by the HA) represented a “general social programme” where residents moved in voluntarily “to improve their conditions” (p. 158). In Smart’s and Fung’s analysis, resettlement tenants were often “recent Chinese immigrants,” who illegally squatted on government land, while GLCH tenants were viewed as “long-term,” deserving residents of Hong Kong (p. 154). When the two housing queues merged, the former became the non-waiting list while the latter became the waiting list. Both lists became covered by the same housing stock from then on. Under the merger, housing distribution became centralized, while the two groups’ interests collided. This was because distribution of housing resources to one list would invariably divert them from the other list. Tensions started to form between the two groups, where the colonial government did not hesitate to capitalize on the anti-immigrant sentiments to further rule. As Fung’s ongoing work show, the colonial government worked with public discourses that blamed immigrants for the long wait for public housing and the worsening housing crisis. The blaming allowed the government to buy time to house the population while not losing colonial legitimacy from the delays.

Smart and Fung thus argue that the HA merger was seminal in that it combined services to two demographic groups in postwar Hong Kong. Following the merger, the HA was tasked to “flexibly arrange and administer housing resources to suit [the government’s] needs” (p. 165). It has done so through the careful calibration of eligibility criterion, as well as the order groups appeared on the housing queue. These calibrations prepared for the definitive 1979 eligibility rule which limited public housing quotas to households with seven years of residences “for more than half of the household” (p. 178). The HA contextualized as such was a landmark organization in consolidating the colonial government’s divide-and-rule tactic, navigating the contesting geopolitics of postwar Hong Kong.

Development: Progress in Public Housing

After explaining the core institution of public housing, this section looks into what constitutes as progress in public housing history. The authors have different definitions of progress, which are evident in their chapter structures and organization of the book. Here, the conventional narrative around public housing is again best represented in Wai, who believes that public housing design has been transformed for the better over time, as one design iteration replaces another based on updated design knowledge and techniques such as with the Resettlement Mark Series. As she writes, designs have been changed according to contemporary needs. Newer resettlement estates grew in stories and flat sizes. They had more common amenities such as elevators, better electricity and water supplies. The apartments gained in separate balconies, toilets, and kitchens (p. 90). In addition, she sees one of the biggest improvement to be a wider variety of unit types to suit different families’ needs. Improved designs reflected the natural advancement of sociopolitical and economic standards and resources, as well as architectural technologies and materials.

Wai sees the natural progression of design from resettlement to HA estates. She considers the basic unit design and public amenities to be “almost identical” to the Twin Towers, an early HA prototype (p. 143). Beyond the merger, the 1975-1994 saw consolidation of multiple standard public housing types, including the old slab, H-block, I-block, new slab, and linear block. In that order, the typologies replaced one another with more refined layout, advanced technological applications, raised flat sizes per capita, and improved modernist parameters such as on ventilation and daylighting. Wai presents a mostly linear timeline for design, except the brief mention of the parallel programs of redevelopment of resettlement estates practiced within the 1973-4 Annual Report of HA, and the Comprehensive Redevelopment Program in the late 1980s which replaced the outmoded and battered resettlements with newer, denser, and more technological new public housing types. These historical episodes did little to challenge the linearity of the new-replace-old timeline. In general, Wai takes the HA as an institution where design expertise and experience could be developed within, as the same group of architects built on an internal design guideline and its use in construction that was improved over time (p. 216). In addition, the synchronous nature of this book means that the designs are still evolving to this day based on this logic of improvement, such as in height, density, layout and individual privacy, public space, and various design details.

While Wai organizes progress around design iterations, Glendinning organizes it based on successions of colonial administrations, represented through the different demeanors and priorities of the governors. In particular, Glendinning is concerned about how different administrations handled the relationship with “the London masters,” and the “substantial autonomy” these administrations achieved from them, which in his opinion, defined each governor’s style of governance (p. xiv). He justifies his focus on administrations by stating the unambiguously “executive-led” nature of Hong Kong. Since the 19th century successive colonial governments endeavored to maintain a self-sustainable budget to avert the intervention of London, in discussions of colonial autonomy. With housing, the government largely relied on the aforementioned piecemeal housing schemes to minimize spending in the 1945-53 period, even past the postwar refugee spike. This changed in the short period of the early 1950s, in frequent fires in squatters culminating in the 1953 Shek Kip Mei fire. The housing crisis became such a real problem which went far beyond the purview of London and purely ideological concerns. As Smart in his previous book suggests, it was not just that the immediate influence of Shek Kip Mei fire on housing policy was overexaggerated, but that its historical significance was misunderstood. Rather, the series of New Kowloon fires inspired London’s and local government’s realizations that the housing issue warranted local responses to constraints and circumstances, ones that could only be deliberated by the “man-on-the-spot” governors. ⁵ As Glendinning wrote, beyond “external pressures from London” the government increasingly saw housing “as a potential field for administrative innovation, and accreditation of policy autonomy for Hong Kong” (p. 27).

When it became Robin Black’s administration (1958-64), Hong Kong’s booming textile industries helped elevate the land prices and revenues for the government, allowing the government to achieve a self-sufficient budget. With it, the Colonial Office no longer had to approve of Hong Kong’s Annual Estimates, consolidating the “administrative self-determination from London” (p. 59). The autonomy allowed the colonial government to enact its estimation that piecemeal relief of fire victims (including their high feeding costs) was much more expensive than coordinated government-built multistorey housing. The government therefore increased its public housing expenditures, expanding especially the mass resettlements. The momentum around public housing was further gained when Black was succeeded by David Trench (1964-71), who “began to coalesce” “coordinated state intervention,” despite a strong private housing sector (p. 95). The spending approach under Trench came to be known as “positive non-intervention,” where an “overall laissez-faire system” was combined with “massive, yet curiously low-key increases in social spending” (p. 102). This consolidated spending approach seriously foreshadowed the reformism with Murray MacLehose (1971-82).

Glendinning argues that the administrations showed progression through a gradual gaining of autonomy from London. The increasingly autonomous status allowed the colonial government to make their own decisions with social spending and housing schemes. In this light, the status culminated in MacLehose’s administration. MacLehose led a domestic reform during an “unexpectedly positive” economic outlook near 1970, when the challenge became “not what could be afforded, but ‘how to boost spending fast enough’” (p. 142). MacLehose thus pioneered the ambitious Ten-Year Housing Plan, promising housing for 1.8 million. In Glendinning’s account, MacLehose’s ambition and output was indeed unmatched in Hong Kong’s public housing history, but these depended on the build-up of autonomy from previous administrations. His utopian vision was only interrupted in two brief instances, firstly in the 1973-4 oil recession when “infrastructural provisions” to housing estates were cut and delayed (p. 176-77), secondly in 1979 and early 1980 when the previous spending cut caused a dip in housing production. But over 1977-82, the housing revolution was consolidated, after MacLehose abolished land premiums for HA sites, the single item that constituted much of the housing projects’ costs. MacLehose’s rule outlived that of the Labor in Britain, who stirred up ideological conflicts with Hong Kong. Afterwards, he survived into the 1979 takeover of the Conservative, who displayed more “admiration for Hong Kong laissez-faire economy,” encouraging his autonomous policies (p. 228).

Glendinning and Smart and Fung are arguing one of the same. For Glendinning, the autonomy MacLehose depended on for his ambitious housing plans, were built on autonomy gained from past administrations since the postwar squatter fires. Likewise, Smart and Fung saw MacLehose less as a turning point for colonial rule in Hong Kong and more as a continuation of politics from past administrations. They subscribed to a recent revisionist view in Hong Kong history that the 1970s reforms were less attributable to a single political figure (MacLehose) and more to the unfolding of a Cold War episode. ⁶ Such view pivoted the considerations of political leaders from local concerns to the colonial relations between Hong Kong and Britain, foregrounding how local leaders prioritized their autonomy from London. In Glendinning’s words, leaders like MacLehose contributed to Hong Kong’s “auto-decolonization,” the departure from metropolitan mandates in “late-colonial rule” (p. xii). In the same light, Smart and Fung argued that MacLehose actually “diverted and softened” the “pressures for reform” (p. 104), when London’s pressures to “initiate social reforms and political changes” (including housing reforms) “exceeded MacLehose’s intention” (p. 103). In spending terms, MacLehose refuted London’s request that about 25 percent of the city’s GDP should be public expenditures, and instead argued that a maximum of 20 percent. This meant that MacLehose did not radically break from the colonial conservatism inherited from Alexander Grantham (1947-57), Black, and Trench, but was continuing their laissez-faireist logic observed with housing policy. ⁷

The continuities did not just happen on the level of the governor, but also on the lower levels of execution. For example, the pre-merger HA was “based on Singapore precedent,” brought into Hong Kong by the housing commissioner Jim Fraser (p. 68). Fraser’s influence bridged the different administrations, building up the momentum for the HA merger to happen in MacLehose’s time. Another veteran public housing architect Donald Liao developed HA design typologies despite changes of administrations. Both figures’ influences as housing technocrats to housing development across successive administrations presented as a counterweight to a history conditioned simply by the governors’ top-down influences. As shown, the governors were far from the only arbiters of public housing progress. As Glendinning writes, “any corresponding shifts in the configuration of Hong Kong government administration . . . were only gradual,” where “the ‘cadet’ elites of administrators” dominated through “intense conservatism” (p. 4). The administrative elites, like Fraser and Liao, were believed to have a prescribed way of governance, maintaining a constancy of ruling style. Therefore, a replacement of one governor with another may not actually count for significant shifts in public housing policy, at least not as categorically as displayed in the chapter structures of Glendinning’s book.

Stakes and Future Directions for Public Housing Research

In the previous sections, we have looked at how public housing is defined, with what institution it is developed under, and in what way is the development quantified by, according to the authors in question. In this final section, I will interrogate the stakes presented by the authors by looking at the history of public housing in Hong Kong in the present time. At the same time, I will propose how their work respectively suggest new directions of research in this field. Among them, Wai presents the lowest stakes in looking at this history. As said, she worked as a public housing architect and saw this part of design history as inherently interesting and worth documenting. She also predicts that the general Hong Kong population, many of whom lived or are living in public housing would be interested in this history. As she recounts conversations with them, the residents tended to reminisce their lives in public housing. Although their lives in resettlement estates were cramped and tough, residents remembered the thriving community where they looked out for one another, in the common areas like corridors and shared kitchens. Throughout the book, she speaks of a neutral view of historical changes. Rather than following the residents’ reminiscences of the lost “human touch” of early resettlement estates following the individualized kitchens and living spaces (p. 17), she merely sees it as a matter of life that times have changed since then. Her neutrality translates into a history as told linearly, with housing typologies and elements improving over time in the hands of designers, while architects and onlookers can look at her book as a neutral manual or guide to think about the future of housing design.

Wai’s book is most useful in tracing the design changes over different public housing variations. Besides the apparent changes like unit types, block types, and layout, she scrutinizes the evolving design to every detail, including laundry racks, blinds, brise-soleil, balconies, and even the mail slots on entrance doors. In addition to designed housing accessories, there are also detailed descriptions of technical details like the facade air conditioners’ racks, and the service doors to pipe access in the toilets, among other finishing and waterproofing details there. These details can each be isolated by future scholars to trace the nuanced progression of design as it contests the conventional historiography.

Glendinning’s book embodies moderate stakes. He articulates two-fold conceptual aims clearly. From a global perspective, he seeks to understand Hong Kong’s (and Singapore’s) “state-organized public housing programme” as an exception to the “decolonizing and developing countries” where “low-income housing was organized on an informal, self-help basis.” At the same time, public housing of these “‘developmental capitalist’ societies” or Asian Tigers (p. xi) was also a strong alternative to the stigmatized and racialized version in the West that “targeted at the poorest ‘slum-dwellers.’” In this way, Hong Kong public housing is seen as “most extreme and fantastic” (p. x), warranting a close look. From a local perspective, he sees public housing history as supplementing and possibly contesting a general history of Hong Kong, where public housing elucidates “concepts such as identity or sovereignty” (p. xii), if not “wider cultural, economic and political discourses” (p. xii). In my opinion, the central argument of the book boils down to how “collective identity and pride” is produced through public housing in different phases, at the same time how it distracted the population from seeking “democratization” (p. xv). While this can be argued for other general policies, such as law, order, and corruption, public housing should stand out as “a key policy area” with comparable if not superior importance to other areas. Public housing’s key importance thus makes it an incision “into the heart of government decision-making processes” (p. xii).

Despite the convincing aims of the book, its execution of the aims is more complicated. In Glendinning’s reasoning, the historiography juggles five themes consecutively. Instead of a clear hierarchy between the themes, they are rather organized “in the order they normally feature” as the history progresses (p. xiv). The first theme concerns the geopolitical factors, asking how public housing featured in the rivalry between Chinese socialism and Western capitalism in postwar Hong Kong—a theme mirroring Smart’s and Fung’s attempt. The second theme reflects what I previously identified as Glendinning’s central theme, which is how public housing became a key identity-building device geared against democratization. The third theme intervenes in the colonial autonomy and economy discussion, with public housing as a case study. The fourth theme identifies the key institution of public housing, and how expertise around it was organized in the official apparatus. The fifth theme acts as an explainer to the proliferation of a “British style preference for standard block-types” in Hong Kong (p. xvi), from the architectural and urban historical perspective. The themes in fact do not come up chronologically one after another, but occur concurrently and in relation to one another, in what Smart and Fung call a policy mangle. For example, in the section on “institution,” I identify that institutional agency (the fourth theme) is not specific to the 1970s HA episode, but is potentially the underpinnings to the entire public housing ontology. In the section on “development,” I also formulate that the colonial autonomy (the third theme) does not just come up with the MacLehose’s administration, but comes up consistently since the immediate-postwar squatter fires (arguably even before that), and as a theme structures the origins of public housing in Hong Kong. Arguably, (public) housing was a driver to the “auto-decolonization” trend that pertained to a good part of Hong Kong’s late-colonial history.

Smart and Fung outline the most explicit stakes of looking at this history, which is to understand the tension between different geopolitical factors. Surely, the selected historical fragments of public and squatter housing reflect on the Cold War landscape in postwar Hong Kong. As said, the competition between temporary and permanent housing, that between resettlement and GLCH residents, and contestations with the continuities and discontinuities of successive administrations, all jolted housing policy to the central stage in discussing antagonism between different powers and ideologies. But these examples do not just speak to Cold War oppositions, but also to that of formal and informal housing. Smart and Fung follow socio-legal studies framework that the state dictates not only through its presence (public housing provision) but also through its absence (tolerance policies of squatters). History of housing can be told such that informality and formality are intertwined rather than separate. For example, the rationales behind the THAs, and the landmark Squatter Occupancy Survey in 1984, which froze all eligible households for squatter resettlement, were invariably contingent on the (in)availability of government housing. This interplay between informal and formal housing is a common theme that runs through both in this historical work and his earlier sociological work, which properly accredits Hong Kong’s urban development to the marginalized (squatter) residents.

In this light, further research can be done on unpacking the dual influences between (in)formality and Cold War geopolitics on Hong Kong’s public housing. To be clear, these influences are not mutually exclusive, both from a global and local perspective, meaning that informal housing, is in its own right, geopolitical. In Hong Kong, it was pointed out that not only were Communist sympathizers in the 1967 Cold War outbreak harbored in resettlement estates, but also in the New Kowloon squatters. ⁸ Internationally for Glendinning, the aforementioned self-help housing in decolonizing and development countries were “significantly endorsed by US-led international development aid agencies in the post-War era” (p. xi). Similarly for Smart and Fung, self-help housing strategies and the associated “entrepreneurship” could not be understood without the promotions of “Reagan, Thatcher, and the International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs” (p. 36). Ideological debates especially implicate the blurriness between informal and formal housing, through figures who champion formalization of informal housing like Hernando de Soto. The disentanglement of these dual influences may prove to be a productive site in connecting future studies of public housing in Hong Kong with the postwar geopolitical discourses in the Global South.