Do you know what Orange mobile, EDF Energy, a dockworkers strike, and Hong Kong’s largest supermarket chain have in common? Continue reading
Category Archives: Hong Kong
Seeing below
Hong Kong is a city of views. Upon arriving in Hong Kong one is assaulted with the image of the famous skyline. This commanding perspective offers a view of the top both literally and figuratively, if we also consider that much of that skyline represents the global circulation of things and money. Populated with 294 buildings over 150m tall (35-40 floors), and 2,354 buildings over 100m tall (New York only has 794), the city handily wins as being the place with the most opportunity to look down from above. But what do you see when you look down? Continue reading
Curves that circle round
Incense burning in a temple, Hong Kong
The smell of incense always brings me up short and evokes a Proustian moment that causes me pause. The smell of incense will always be Hong Kong in my mind. The sweet, heavy odour is encountered in accidental moments throughout the city as there are large and small temples, some so small they are just depressions outside a door, all over the city. Incense gives a home to the ghosts of elders, freeing up domestic space for good fortune. It also gives thanks for gifts bestowed by gods and is offered in anticipation of future benefit. As such it’s circular form is also a mechanism through which time can curve back upon itself.
Every taste a new experience
While the impression one gets of Hong Kong as expressed through the landscape images of its skyline is one of hyper-modernity, there is an ordinary side of the city which is not frame-able in dialectal understandings of pre-modern and modern, nor is it reducible to the visual cleanliness and cool sterility that the global city image tries to convey. Indeed the production of the Global City image in its attempt to produce spectacle, erases the everyday and the people involved in producing that everyday. In doing so that which makes the city magnificent is also erased. Continue reading
GeoFoodie 
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