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3 - The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
When we travel to other cities as a result of personal desire — for example in our identity as tourists — we are driven to a significant extent by the place that city has in our imaginative life. Early in Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time the young narrator looks forward in anticipation to a family visit to a town called Balbec on the French Atlantic coast (actually a fictionalization of the name Cabourg), and like that fictional character our notion of a place and its attractiveness can be fuelled by textual and visual images of it we may have consumed (and these may have been derived from film, literature and art as much as from factual television programmes or holiday brochures and their glossy illustrations). In the case of Proust’s narrator, the reality of Balbec fails to match the promise of those images, and one major lesson of Proust is the recognition of a gap between the world and our desire-laden images of it. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to think we could ever escape our imaginary images of a place by going there. No fully demystified relation to the world would ever be possible, even if it were desirable. Even after we have visited a city or even lived in it, our sense of it is still a mediated one, its concrete realities entangled with the stories we have gathered and generated about it.1 Even when we don’t travel — even when we stay in our home city — the images of other cities stay with us. No city is absolutely different from other cities, so we think about our own city with reference to others, comparatively. We describe it to people by telling them what other cities it is like, for instance. At the level of the city itself, too, there is a constant awareness of its others, and since this awareness is not simply neutral but tainted by the desire to emulate or compete, I want to talk of cities being haunted by other cities. By using the word “haunted” I wish to convey the sense of other cities as always uncomfortably 3 The Haunted City: Hong Kong and Its Urban Others David Clarke ch03(041-054).indd 41 25/05/2010 2:59 PM 42 David Clarke present, even when a city might wish to exorcize all trace of them, and to signal that the relationship with other cities can, on occasion at least, be a problematic one. Although the everyday sense of the word “haunting” implies a disruptive invasion of the present by a trace of the past, I choose to extend its application here, applying the term to a spatial rather than a temporal dimension. Perhaps not all cities are significantly haunted by others, but I suspect that all cities with the ambition to be thought of as “world cities” are, as well as all cities that are going through significant phases of physical or socio-political development (as is the case with many Asian cities today).2 Perhaps such haunting is more common now than in the past, due to the increasing pace of globalization and our increasing awareness of other cities or at least of their images, but I believe it was already quite widespread in developing cities during earlier periods of modernity. Although, if one can imagine cities for a moment as people, there might be particular historical moments when a city might be so deeply affected by trauma that it appears to turn in on itself (perhaps New York in the wake of 11 September 2001 might be considered such a place) or so sure of itself that it does not seem to recognize any peers (again New York at an earlier skyscraper-constructing stage of its modern history might potentially serve as an example); in fact the narcissism induced by both the two extremes of abjection and triumph is unlikely to be complete. Indeed, if one discovers a contemporary city that seems to be free of haunting by its others, one is likely to have found a city without a clear sense of itself as a city, without a civic life in any expanded sense. And a major city at a crucial juncture of its history can on the other hand be haunted by several other cities. Of course, cities are not the same as people, so to talk of a city as being narcissistic or as emulating another is something of a convenient...