HONG KONG–ZHUHAI–MACAU BRIDGE (HZMB) AS A

TRANS-BORDER

PARADIGM SHIFT

Fall 2015

Topics in Modernism - Hong Kong: Uncertain(ci)ty

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Advisor: Cole Roskam

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PROJECT STATEMENT

 

The Chek Lap Kok Airport is one of the world’s busiest passenger airports and is often praised for its modernity, efficiency and speed.

 

However, from its early beginnings, the airport’s political significance has been widely debated, e.g. sovereignty over financial control before handover in the 1980s, public interests in the three runway system in 2010s, deportation of political dissents in 2000s, etc.

 

With the future Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) in completion, this paper aims to reveal and examine the architectural and planning aspects that indicate the political uncertainty in Hong Kong, and in mediating different scales of trans-border migrancy, both ‘as a subject of study and as a methodological trope’[1], in terms of three strategic discourses.

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The argument is that, the Chek Lap Kok Airport is the apotheosis of bureaucracy; however, contested tensions often anticipate the crisis of sovereign and governmental legitimacy.

 

China’s Pearl River Delta Ferry Network and Zhuhai-Macau Cross Boundary Facilities (ZMBCF), are the typical products of corporatism.

 

The HZMB, with socially interactive projections, is anticipated to be the assemblage of bureaucracy and corporatism, and is also projected to be a new ‘city’ charged with political, economical, social and sustainable forces.

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