Port Cities and Housing Stories: Built Forms, the Everyday and Urban Imaginaries, 1890-1965

This project uses “housing stories” as a prism to examine how literature produced in, or about,Hong Kong, Singapore, and London represent, critique, and interrogate the urban livingconditions from 1890 to 1965. Situating within a growing critical interest in the emergence ofport cities in “the age of steam” and “the first globalisation” in the nineteenth and the earlytwentieth centuries (Heerten 351), it aims to open a new line of inquiry by examining the literaryengagement with places and spaces that are associated with seemingly mundane activities andnondescript built structures. These everyday spaces and practices, I argue, were an integral partof the modern lived experience though ones that have frequently been overlooked in discourseson modernity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.This project argues that literary texts not only offer imaginative possibilities of urban life butalso engage with the contested meanings of home and foreground spatial justice issues that shapepeople’s ways of living. It will emphasise the literary representations and re-envisioning ofordinary people’s lived experiences in selected housing typologies, including tenements, sharedflats, boarding and lodging houses, and tong lau. It will further contend that these “domestic”spaces were closely related to public spaces, such as streets and thoroughfares, as the boundarybetween these spaces were blurred for many immigrants, professionals, and individuals whocould not afford private or single-family homes, and who might have sought refuge in publicspaces from their crowded living conditions.While mobility is often seen as a major constituent of the modern way of life and a key feature ofport cities, it is what happens after the various inter-city, rural-urban, or transnational journeys—that is, how people live and dwell—that will be the emphasis of this project. It will focus onshort stories and novels. While the novelistic form has been noted for its engagement with theeveryday and its inclusiveness of different voices, short stories published in literary periodicalsand presses have a close relationship with the everyday life of their target readers due to theirpublication format and frequently, their simultaneity with their readers’ contemporary present.By actively bringing English-language and Chinese-language literary texts together for analysisand looking into their print contexts, I aim to engage with different perspectives and voices aswell as explore the various “print-worlds” that co-existed within and across these port cities.