Sustainable community building in the face of state-led gentrification: the story of the Blue House cluster in Hong Kong

This paper examines how a community in Hong Kong, led by a local charity, mobilised its bonding, bridging and linking social capital to transform a government-initiated regeneration project that had aimed at commodifying a residential heritage building cluster as a shopping facility to attract tourists into a community commons. The community succeeded in retaining the housing right of sitting tenants and the use right of the building cluster to experiment with re-embedding economic development within social relationships. The Blue House cluster is located in Wanchai, a rapidly gentrifying area east of the Central Business District in Hong Kong. Although continuing residents have experienced a kind of ‘in situ displacement’ as the surrounding built and socio-economic environments have continued to gentrify, the case nevertheless provides valuable insights into the merit of adapting heritage buildings as a base for those relationship-rich community members to practise recommoning, to (re)build with new residents a sustainable community.