Re-politicizing the urban

Abstract

Formally called “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” the 2014 Umbrella Movement was a civil undertaking that dominated Hong Kong’s urban landscape for a period of 81 days. This period of unrest expressed a collective spatial claim across the entire Hong Kong territory. With the streets as the primary medium of protest, the protesters barricaded bridges, flyovers and any available form of accessible spaces within their collective and material body of protest. The extraction of political debate away from the private realm, from the containment of a widespread interiority, brought political difference within the urban arteries of the world’s third densest city.

This chapter approaches the commons as processes of re-politicizing urban space. We examine the material realities that catalyzed the Umbrella Movement to explain four key aspects. First, we outline the premise of collective actions and the discourse of the commons, before linking their emergence to the spatial particularities of territories and in this case, Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. After that, we explore the notions of interiority and exteriority, not as fixed spatial terms but as animated and interchangeable conditions whereby culture and technology merge to allow for the (un)folding of affective and transformative practices of commoning technicities. It is through a folded and membranic understanding of the relation between the interior and the exterior that we posit the importance of the Umbrella Movement as an urban event: its attempt to re-politicize the urban by bringing its interiorized past in touch with an exteriorized future.