Architecture, Infrastructure, and Urban Performance in Hong Kong

Global cities are cast by developers, governments, and corporations as creative hubs, idea incubators, unfettered marketplaces, engines of innovation, and evolving entities; they are endlessly prolific organisms that perform a repertoire of increasingly standardized roles. In their introduction to Performance and the Global City (2013), editors D.J. Hopkins and Kim Solga ask, "In the wake of the global city as the geosocial condition of this century, how can urban performance disrupt outmoded, unproductive national identities and work to constitute new ones?" Tilting this question slightly, I ask, How do global cities perform? How can theatre scale down and tune into these performances? Contextualizing these questions in Hong Kong, the global city emerges not as an alternative to nationalist identities, but as a channel through which they are revived, although not without contestation. Bringing new materialism, architecture, and urban studies into dialogue with performance studies, this essay examines how the city's architecture (its design and relationships between components) and infrastructure (the components themselves) interact with, react to, and act on other urban actors. The essay's case studies, The Architecture of the City (2017) by Hong Kong–based Zuni Icosahedron and Remote Hong Kong (2018) by Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll, cast Hong Kong as protagonist, giving voice and memory to the global city in both its analog and digital registers, and activating the dispositions, spatial design, and lively infrastructures that animate urban performance—performances of and in the global city.