Abbas’s text here was focusing on the term ‘disappearance’, where its meaning of cultural (architectural) disappearance due to Hong Kong’s Urbanisation gave me a hard time on reflecting what we had sacrificed in the past decades to build what we see today. Surprisingly, the ending of the text pointed my mind to a whole new perspective, when our city became more ‘placeless’ and  ‘anonymous’ due to hyperdensity and economic growth, instead of making Hong Kong characterless, would that actually brings us character? Hong Kong were nowhere before being colonised by the British, although this opens up Hong Kong to be

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In the chapter of Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and Colonial Space, the author discusses the different types of Hong Kong architecture and the disappearance of history caused by improper preservation. For Hong Kong architecture, the author divides it into three categories, with the Merely Local being the salient one. It refers to those underwent incomplete preservation. As the example mentioned by the author, Flagstaff House, which now was preserved into a Chinese teaware museum. It is called Merely Local because the preservation was trying to shift people’s focus from the solemn weight of history to promoting Chinese traditional

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HE Yifu   Abbas’s “typology of scopic regime” perspective is inspiring for me. He argued that the city could be seen in three different ways, the “real”, the “surreal” and the “hyperreal”. While the “real” is the visible or seen parts of a city, the “surreal” and “hyperreal” are the parts that are usually “unseen”. If we include the “surreal” and “hyperreal” in a new scopic regime — “unreal”, we would have a binary scope of viewing a city, in which we conclude what we see easily as “real” and what we don’t often see as “unreal”. For citizens living

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In Michael de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life”, we are introduced with an interesting yet familiar and personal concept of walking and how it represents the city. This piece of writing bases much of its thought on the historical context of 1967. The 1967 French revolution was resistance to consumerism, capitalism, and the grand American imperialism. Certeau is concerned about consumption overtaking the individual value and experiences. He links this to the city by breaking down what a real city consists of and how it functions. He stresses the value of walking that happens “down below, below the thresholds

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Everyone’s daily life somehow reflects the society or the social system they are in. By portraying a space, which composed of direction, velocities and time variables, films construct an environment to understand a place, to understand the system there. Michel de Certeau fully explains this opinion by analyzing three films including Rear Window, a film that tells a story of a mysterious murder in NY of the 1950s through the eyes of a voyeur. Rooms, windows, count yard are all the places where stories happen. By discribing these , characters and experience of figures, relationship of couples, lifestyles and social

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