RG44/09-10 City Imagineering of Hong Kong: Place Making and Struggle between Globalness and Local Identity

In Chief Executive Policy Address 2007, the Financial Secretary is assigned to formulate strategies to revitalize ‘Brand Hong Kong’ and step up publicity efforts highlighting HK as Asia’s world city. HK people’s ‘core values’ will be re-searched, re-engineered, and re-vitalized. In fact, HK has experienced immense challenges from globalization recently. She needs serious repositioning and creates a new city identity in order to survive against three serious challenges. First, the world economy is characterized by the increasingly intense competition among different city-regions, whereby cities such as Hong Kong have to struggle between their globalness and their local identity. Second, creating a global character necessitates a transformation and reconfiguration of the existing places so as to make them more attractive to foreign investment and visitors. Third, as a corollary of the above two currents, reinventing a global city through crafting a new city identity and place making inevitably alienates some local groups and invites some sort of disagreements/resistances. In order to alleviate the problems, effective governance requires a strategic plan, which includes proper visioning or imagineering that combined city making and place making so as to attain both global competitiveness and local approval. In this proposed qualitative research, we intend to examine the imagineering efforts of the Government in response to the above three challenges, including their understanding to the challenges, their strategic ways to tackle the challenges, and the outcome of their strategies. 

Project Year: 2010-2011

Funding Source: Internal Research Grant 2010-11

Project Team Member: Law Kam Yee

Project Detail: Here