By studying Chungking Mansions, a building complex located in Hong Kong, I explore how the built environment and urban space influences and is influenced by both legal materiality and the political geographies of surveillance. Here, thousands belonging to Hong Kong’s minority South Asian population live and work (at times informally or illegally) in a place dubbed the city’s ‘last ghetto’, which stands in contrast to its affluent, sanitised, and hyper-modern surroundings.
Using an approach that combines critical geography scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork, I trace Chungking Mansions through the political contestations that inevitably arise between the regulation of ‘local’ space and the ‘others’ that inhabit it. I specifically focus on four encounters that illustrate the interpolation of law, space, and political power: a) bodily practices of surveillance between street touts and police; b) the usage of legal objects (e.g. licenses and databases) to regulate trade; c) the internal bordering of Chungking Mansions’ urban fabric by non-state actors; and d) forms of resistance exercised by asylum-seekers.
Studying Chungking Mansions in this way allows for both an inter-Asian and, within it, a distinctly subaltern or ‘Other’ intervention in discussions surrounding urban studies, law, politics, and geography, which have traditionally focused on Western space and normativity. Moreover, framing the building complex as a distinctly political, spatial, and legal assemblage reveals not only how it is enmeshed within Hong Kong’s broader urban fabric, but how it remains a vital site of alternative globalisation as well.