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In preparation for the WIPs next week, perhaps its relevant to introduce my research topic, although I'll keep enough back so that all of you from my course won't get bored on Wednesday afternoon....
For this essay, we have to follow a design change or development through a critical historiography, which is in itself a difficult thing to grasp. It is a much less tangible task than the first essay, as of course we could always come back to our object if we veered off course but this topic was much harder to pin down. We had to choose a time period and location to cut down on the crazy amount of material we might potentially have to deal with.
I at least knew that I wanted to focus on Hong Kong, which visibly has had a significant change in the landscape in recent years, so something must have happened. So I decide the best thing would be to ask my parents. It seemed that they were in a good position to identify the everyday changes that had taken place in the last few years, as they had had some distance with the place, but visited often enough that they could see the smaller effects of the bigger picture. They felt (as food is of course, very important whenever we visit) that the most noticeable change was the decline in a kind of eating place called a dai pai dong, a very informally set up restaurant that feature fold up tables and plastic stools, and serve up a small selection of heart seasonal dishes. No fuss, but always great food. These venues serve up breakfast, lunch and dinner, or also the late afternoon snack with a Hong Kong milk tea or a can of coke. They suggested the area of Mong Kok in Kowloon, as a place that I recognise myself, but also as an important consumption district in Hong Kong. These were not only a big part of the growing up of my parent's generation, but also pepper my own memory of Hong Kong. I also wanted to include the street food hawker in the conversation about dai pai dong, as in my view there is something about them that really relate. They serve similar foods, have similar kinds of patrons and occupy the same kinds of spaces in Hong Kong. Both have a temporality that I don't recognise in other kinds of eating venues in Hong Kong.
This had all changed a lot even since I had been born, so I chose my time period as between 1997 until now, knowing that the handover from Britain to China is a crucial point in Hong Kong history. Naïvely, I had only really chosen it to be a consistent politics but of course this has really developed with learning more and more about the political landscape of both China and Hong Kong at that time.
In early February, I thought my design change would be relatively obvious, focusing on the street and change in urban planning. I felt like this was already a pretty expansive topic with plenty of challenges for me to practice dealing with. But then the day after the proposal hand-in, riots broke out over the police removal of street vendors in Mong Kok. From the riot, and previous protest activity in Mong Kok, it clarifies that these streets and its activity is much more that the change in urban planning. The change is also in the people; they are further vocalising their feeling towards government changes to their territories and therefore their identities. Food is essential to the everyday life of Hong Kong people, and it is clear that the way in which they eat together, often at these informal outdoor venues, are a huge part of their collective identity. It really shook me that I had chosen something that was so current, and I think I worried that I didn't know enough to talk about this coherently and intellectually. Further research and just finding as many sources as possible, and talking to some specialists on Hong Kong and markets has really helped though to settle that insecurity, and so hopefully this week's presentation I can get some feedback in how I'm dealing with it so far.
It's still unclear how I'm going to structure this so that it is easy to understand through design history, but hopefully this will come with more time with my material. I feel like I also have the advantage of my parents, in that they, and myself, have first hand experience of these social gatherings around dai pai dong and how it has effected even our experience of Hong Kong. Spatial issues are of course intrinsic to the workings of a city, and perhaps is even more magnified in the special conditions that Hong Kong is under, not only tiny, but also with such a specific historic relationship with two different countries and cultures.
Fingers crossed for me on Wednesday! Hopefully this is a satisfying taster (couldn't help it) for the essay to come!
