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Abstract

Hong Kong’s squatter settlements—which housed up to twenty percent of the city’s population over the twentieth century—have predominantly been considered a postwar phenomenon, a transitional stage prior to the public housing system for which Hong Kong is renowned today. This thesis, however, argues that Hong Kong’s squatter settlements are best understood through a longue durée history of a concept whose origins began in precolonial times and which constituted a site of contestation throughout the existence of the colony. In unsettling and historicizing the concept of ‘squatting’ in Hong Kong, my argument opens up an understudied dimension of politics in Hong Kong’s history and situates colonial Hong Kong within the broader landscape of urban informality around the world. The narrative progresses over three periods, focusing on the territory of ‘New Kowloon,’ a space leased in 1898 but folded into ceded urban Kowloon, which was home to the highest proportion of squatters in the colony. It begins with the origins of a normalized informal land regime in the Hong Kong region from the early Qing dynasty (ca. 1669) into the first two decades of British administration in New Kowloon. It subsequently identifies the ‘transwar’ period of 1937-1948 as a crucial turning point where squatting was elevated into a social problem, necessitating new kinds of state and societal intervention and remaking the relationship between squatter residents and the colonial government. Finally, it traces how the ‘squatter’ concept evolved and interacted with the emergence of a new resettlement paradigm in early Cold War Hong Kong, culminating in the 1954 establishment of the multi-storey resettlement program under the new Resettlement Department. In this process, squatter residents and other actors drew upon multiple past layers of precedent and practice to complicate the conceptualization of ‘squatting,’ even as colonial officials began to define the act in sharper, more juridical terms. Collectively, these transformations demonstrate a process of what I call “sedimentary planning,” in which the development of urban Hong Kong was not imposed from above but rather shaped by multiple actors who made use of the accumulations of meaning left from the past.