ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Empowering the Disempowered? Hawkers’ Self-Empowerment and Self-mobilised, Community-led Plan-making in Hong Kong

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 17 | PUBLIC SPACE

Speaker

Mr Ka Chi Yip (Department of Geography and Environment, The London School of Economics and Political Science)

Description

Public spaces, including (in)formal temporary hawker bazaars on publicly owned land, serve as important sites for transformative urban changes and inclusive community-building. This paper examines the Saving Pang Jai Campaign, a self-mobilised, community-led planning initiative in Hong Kong in the mid-2010s that sought to preserve and reimagine the Yen Chow Street Temporary Hawker Bazaar (Pang Jai), a 44-year-old (in)formal temporary fabric market facing demolition.
In the mid-2010s, Pang Jai bazaar was proposed for demolition to make way for public housing under the city's housing shortage crisis. From the government’s perspective, the bazaar was a public space temporarily designated for fabric trading for 44 years. From a bottom-up perspective, however, it was a lived ‘community commons’, where hawking accumulated social capital and fostered connections between fabric-related industries and the wider community. These social values underpinned the Saving Pang Jai Campaign, which sought to explore alternative futures for the bazaar. Through participatory planning workshops and collaborative advocacy, hawkers, many of whom were unlicensed and excluded from formal decision-making on the bazaar’s demolition or relocation, co-developed an alternative vision, and reimagining the bazaar as a ‘commons’ for fabric trading and other disadvantaged communities in the surrounding neighbourhood, addressing broader communal needs in the community level.
Drawing on interviews and observations conducted in 2019, this study analyses how non-institutionalised planning processes empower marginalised and disempowered urban actors like hawkers to dream the community futures. It argues that community-led planning enables hawkers to assert their rights by leveraging place-based knowledge, expanding social networks and collectively shaping urban futures beyond state-defined planning frameworks. The self-mobilised community plan also served as an ‘intellectual commons’ within the hawker community, fostering a more stakeholder-inclusive fabric market space. The campaign not only contested top-down redevelopment but also illustrated how informal public spaces can be sites of hope, fostering social resilience and alternative economic possibilities with hope.
By situating Pang Jai’s plan-making experience within debates on self-empowerment and community-led planning, this paper highlights the transformative potential of grassroots urbanism in resisting dispossession and turning ‘dystopian outcomes’ into community assets. Although the market was forcibly relocated to a formalised market by the government in January 2023 and the community plan was ultimately disregarded, Pang Jai’s legacy and its stakeholders offer valuable lessons for urban planners on engaging with ‘informal’ and ‘temporary’ spaces. Despite Pang Jai’s unsuccessful attempt to turn the plan into implementation, it contributes to conversations on how informal spaces, often overlooked in planning, can serve as catalysts for inclusive and sustainable urban transformation.