Garden City

Urban Form, Colonial Domesticity, and Spaces of Play for Children in Interwar Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper considers how the Garden City movement in interwar Hong Kong created a new residential architecture and supervised play space for middle-class Chinese children in suburban districts in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Pioneered by Ebenezer Howard in his 1899 publication To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the original garden city idea advocated the establishment of self-sustained communities that integrated country and town life. When transplanted to Hong Kong, the garden city idea responded simultaneously to a wide stream of cultural currents. For the colonial state, it was an effective means to enact new town planning culture – creating a healthy domestic form on the one hand, and transforming suburban housing form on the other. For the Chinese bourgeoisies, it allowed this class sector to consume the expanding material culture of respectability. Garden city estates, in turn, functioned as an expression of a class, namely, the colonial polite society. The principle of wholesome community life advocated by the garden city idea subsequently gave rise to residents’ associations that campaigned for the expansion of play architecture for children. As city-based bourgeoisie – comprising both European and Chinese mercantile and professional classes – offloaded their concern and frustration for urban health, particularly that of children, onto the newly developed garden city neighbourhoods, they helped to define an architecture and landscape of play that was distinctly counter-urban. Play architecture thus functioned as an expression of class anxiety, a shared outlook of the urban elite on childhood, and beneath it, lies the frustration about and hope for the future of the British empire.