opening paragraph:Time-lapse video amplifies the speed of traffic, people, and their movement around the cityscape of Hong Kong. In a video, "The Best Is Yet to Come," dedicated to promoting Hong Kong as "Asia's World City," for example, writers used the magnification of speed to emulate the dynamics of capital's never-ending flow.1 Time-lapse brands Hong Kong and creates a visual metaphor for the elusiveness of "connectivity" that depicts Hong Kong culture as one of rapidity and instant gratification. Recently, speed has been foremost on the mind of Hong Kongers caught in the political quagmire surrounding what has been lambasted as "white elephant" projects devoted to more speedy connections to mainland China. Time-lapse forms the idealized mirror image of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which, without station stops cuts traveling time to Guangzhou from two hours down to forty-eight minutes. The fantasy of uninhibited speed occludes the controversy of the co-location agreement that ceded Hong Kong territory to the mainland allowing for the practice of Chinese law on Hong Kong soil in direct counter-indication of Hong Kong's mini-constitution. "One train, two systems" directly challenges "One country, two [End Page 619] systems." Plagued by financial woes and construction setbacks, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau mega bridge connects Hong Kong to the Pearl River Delta and puts each city within an hour's commute of each other. Faster and more efficient connections between locations in southern China cemented a new geographical and economic proposition envisioned by officials as the Greater Bay Area. In the context of Hong Kong, faster connections also compress space by supposedly bringing "two systems" closer in a more harmonious temporal and political network.

This paper describes the effects of Seating for Socializing (SOS), a
place-making project designed to revitalize open public spaces in
Hong Kong which suffer from a lack of urban life. The study was
conducted by combining quantitative and qualitative methods in
order to understand the impact of this temporary urban design
intervention in different spatial contexts. The results suggest that
the use of bottom-up approaches and tactical design actions can
be a valuable tool for promoting new social relations among the
citizens as well as rethinking existing weaknesses in the conditions
of the city’s public spaces.

This article examines the Hong Kong refugee policy and its relationship to local people’s attitudes towards asylum-seekers and refugees, since the launch in 2014 of a new mechanism to assess their claims. Based on an analysis of debates between 2015 and 2018 in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, government statements and documents, media reports, two surveys on local people’s attitudes and an NGO interview, I argue that the government has sought to criminalize asylum-seekers by forcing them to breach Hong Kong’s immigration law. The article suggests that a pragmatic, inclusive approach would help the government to promote ethnic harmony in the territory.

This article examines how schools in Hong Kong attempt to craft South Asian migrant students into desirable citizens and how the youths understand themselves as members of Hong Kong and of a global community. The contestation has to do both with how South Asians are viewed in Hong Kong and with how post-colonial Hong Kong is related to China. The process of citizen-making of transnational youths, I argue, is best understood at the local–national–global intersection.

Government response to public opinion is essential to democratic theory and practice. However, previous research on the relationship between public opinion and government attention predominantly focuses on western societies. Little is known about such relationship in nonwestern or nondemocratic societies. Drawing upon time-series data of public opinion polls and government press releases, this study examines the dynamic relationships between public opinion and government attention in posthandover Hong Kong. The findings reveal that the responsiveness of the Hong Kong government to public opinion varies across issue domains and is constrained by the political power from the central government in Beijing.

Private ownership of publicly-accessible space is a phenomenon that is increasingly being adopted in new urban developments in many cities around the world. The purpose and role of these spaces, especially in Hong Kong, has been widely criticised for failing to effectively engage with the public realm of the city, a fact which, in addition to being a cause for concern for the Hong Kong government, has raised questions about the benefits of the programme.
Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study examines 28 public open spaces in private development (POSPD) in the financial district of Hong Kong with the aim of both evaluating the spatial characteristics as well as understanding their potential contribution to the multilevel structure of this dense urban area.
The research further establishes a new evaluation index as an alternative theoretical framework to assess other critical aspects which may affect their capacity to encourage social activities.
The results of the study suggest that, although a large percentage of the POSPDs analysed are not providing positive impact to the district, they hold significant potential which, with new strategies in place, could greatly enrich the pedestrian and social experience in Hong Kong’s dynamic and complex urban environment.