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Placemaking in Hong Kong's heritage revitalisation: Delivering community value or masking commercialisation?

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    Chuang, Wai Sam.pdf
    Chuang, Wai Sam.pdf
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    Placemaking in Hong Kong's heritage revitalisation: Delivering community value or masking commercialisation?

    Hong Kong, along with other neoliberal, capitalist cities around the world, is experiencing a growing trend towards commercialisation in heritage revitalisation. On the other hand, there is advocacy for democratising urban planning where placemaking that aimed to foster a sense of place and community cohesion have arisen. In the dominant literature, there is a prevalent division on top-down and bottom-up approaches of placemaking. Contrary to the original intent of placemaking, the former is interpreted as an entrepreneurial strategy that employs heritage revitalisation as a branding tool and primarily seeks economic growth. The latter establishes place identity and heritage value. Critiquing on the binary concept of placemaking, this paper analyses how an in-between form of collaborative placemaking is used to facilitate the delivery of community values in a seemingly top-down revitalization initiated by the government and the Urban Renewal Authority (URA). This study focuses on the case of Central Market (CM) revitalisation project. It addresses the gap of collaborative placemaking by examining the power dynamics and participation of actors involved, the three manifestations of placemaking (tangible, intangible and mixed), and cross-evaluating the social and economic dimensions. While the case demonstrates an effort to deliver community value through authentic place attachment and cultural memories, which distinguishes it from previous URA-led revitalisation projects, it is concluded that the case study is not unique. This form of placemaking is found to be transferrable across large-scale revitalisation projects in Hong Kong as organisational intervention sets the scene by providing necessary landscapes and builtscapes, that should be combined with mindscapes and storyscapes to serve people. It is argued that recurring efforts and appropriate partnership are essential to deliver a sustainable outcome oriented towards genuine benefits for the public.

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