6TH URBAN SPACE AND SOCIAL LIFE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
Projects in Cities and Identities
Location: City University of Hong Kong & University of Macau, China.
June 6-11, 2015
The 4C5M Studio’s 6th Urban Space and Social Life conference invites papers and design competitions that explore the relationship between city projects and identities. Projects in city include infrastructure (hardware), policies (software) and all things in between. Multi-dimensional identity includes, but is not limited to, cultural, ethnic, gender, class, and place identity. Case studies and theories in the form of papers and spatial designs which reflect the relationship between projects and identities from international scholars, professionals, business sector and government sectors will stimulate our understanding of and the practice of this important topic.
The conference locations provide an excellent platform to ponder our themes. The longest sea bridge in the world is now being built to connect Hong Kong-Zuhai-Macau by 2016. Costing $HK25 billion, this mammoth project will have three lanes in each direction and will be a total of 29.6km in length. The bridge that will carry 60,000 cars and trucks a day will further integrate the three cities in the region. How will this project impact on Hong Kong’s cultural identity? After all, Hong Kong is about to become and “adult”. It will celebrate its 18th birthday in 2015 as a Special Administrative Region of China since it ceased to be a British colony in 1997. Yet its people are still struggling to adjust their contested cultural/place identity. And how does the bridge impact the lives of the people in these three cities? Shenzhen was the experimental site for the contemporary economic development in China. Since 1980s, its expansion has experienced dramatic changes and it has gradually merged into other regions in the South. How does this development shape the contemporary Chinese cultural/place identity? We welcome papers that explore the examples above and their specific cases around the world.