Vitality and neighborhoods: Social class and Hong Kong

Public housing in Tai Po

This post has to come with some huge disclaimers, acknowledging that I am a newcomer, both to living in Hong Kong, and to the study of social class. However reading, possibly voraciously, for a research-based thesis on the issue, makes it hard not to reflect on my daily life here. Not being a Hong Kong local, nor having grown-up within the classed systems in Hong Kong, I may well be misunderstanding what is going on.
That said, my comments here are indebted to work by Mary Pattillo whose insights into the process of neighborhood formation provoked my thoughts here.
Having migrated to Hong Kong, I am surprised at how positive my reactions to the place have been. As someone who loved my 'home-town' of Melbourne, there could be many reasons for me to be slow to warm up to Hong Kong. Yet it is hard for me not to love. Everywhere I look there is something going on. The streets are always alive with people. The built environment is an amazing mixture of traditional Chinese, and modern global city. As I have commented in an earlier post, the public transport is fantastic. The food here, whether in supermarkets or in restaurants, seems truly global, drawn firstly from the region (China/Japan/Korea/Thailand/Vietnam) and then beyond (Europe, South and North America, and as major food-producers, Australia & South Africa). What's not to like?
Reading about the ways in which social classes are maintained and constrained by urban planning, caused me to reflect on some basic facts of Hong Kong life that may contribute to why this is such a vibrant city. One of the ironies of urban planning is that the most vibrant places in cities around the world are often that way because of the diversity of people (in both class and ethnicity) that rub shoulders, often literally, in those areas. It is ironic, because as places get recognised for their vibrancy, a process of gentrification sets in whereby the affluent move in, property prices go up, and the vibrancy of a place starts to be compromised, because it becomes inaccessible to most of the people who once made it so. In many places, when gentrification happens, there is often a loss of both social housing, and also of public transportation options.
These two things caught my eye. If there are two things that Hong Kong has in spades, they are public transportation and social housing. According to most the recent census here, in 2006, 48.8% of people in Hong Kong live in some form of public housing (for further info see this delightful article in wikipedia). This is a huge percentage of the population, and probably says something about the very high costs of private housing in Hong Kong. As far as public transport, there seems to be no place on the island that cannot be reached by public transport, whether it is the ultra-efficient MTR, the ferries, the double-decker buses, or the ever-enthralling minibuses. What is more, this transport is very reasonably priced and very frequent. Even if this were not true, there always seem to be taxis close-by, and these are a surprisingly cheap alternative, particularly late at night when public transport may have stopped. These two pieces of information mean that as a Hong Kong citizen, whatever your income, it should be possible to live in a variety of places across the city, and to be able to access most other places with relative simplicity.
These two factors must help to promote the vibrancy and excitement of this city. On a more descriptive, rather than analytical level, this can be illustrated by the Graham Street wet-market. This is the city's most famous wet-market, which happens on a narrow and very steep street in Central in Hong Kong. In Melbourne, it would be my perception that a market such as this would have been driven out perhaps thirty or forty years ago, by high prices, local government opposition, or perhaps a lack of customers (though perhaps the Queen Victoria market proves me wrong). Despite the almost comically high real-estate prices in Central, it still seems to be hanging on (though apparently there is some danger of it being redeveloped).
In thinking about the sustainability of cities (I will post on this shortly), and climate change-dominated futures, making cities places that people love to live is going to be particularly vital. Hong Kong, with it's mix of good public transport AND public housing, seems to offer a good model for how to do so. It is interesting that many of those who argue for gentrification talk about the increased buying power of those moving into the area, which is good for local businesses. While this may be true in some very limited sense, it seems to assume a guaranteed (low) density of housing. The Hong Kong solution seems to say that if you put ten (or twenty, or thirty) people in the space that might in most cities be occupied by just one or two, then no matter how low their spending power in a relative sense, they will still spend more in an absolute sense, thus promoting a vibrant city. Or at least that's the way it seems to me.