12 Farming against real estate
dominance
The Ma Shi Po community farm in
Hong KongKa-ming Wu
Busy and crowded streets, hundreds of people cramming together at crossroads,
glass-windowed skyscrapers lined up along harbor coastlines—these are some
of the images that best capture the city landscape of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is
one of the world’s most densely populated cities, with more than 7 million people
living in a total area of only about 1,100 square kilometers. Rapid economic
growth since 1970 has earned the city the honor of being one of Asia’s “four little
dragons”. But if developmental success and urban prosperity are key highlights
of recent history, a very different set of concerns are raised when one considers
today’s Hong Kong, 15 years after its handover to China. This chapter focuses
on the case of Ma Shi Po, a soon-to-be demolished village in northeastern Hong
Kong, and the social activism of its residents and advocates in order to examine
how global environmental and agricultural concerns have brought about new
understandings of farming, urban planning and community in Hong Kong today.
This chapter contributes to ongoing debates about global environmental
struggles and communal garden movements as they relate to food security, food
safety, and alternative food networks (Armstrong 2000; Evers and Hodgson 2011;
Firth, Maye, and Pearson 2011); ecological citizenship (Baker 2004; Seyfang
2006); and food democracy in global urban contexts (Hassanein 2003). The
article argues that rural activism in Hong Kong is part of a global environmental
movement to support and sustain community gardens and motivates critical
reflection on issues such as food production and consumption, urban planning,
and development. But I will also highlight how this case has been crucial in the
last few years in shaping new public debates and new meanings of social and
environmental activisms in Hong Kong.
In the last few decades, local environmental groups in Hong Kong have largely
been focused on the technical and lifestyle aspects of environmental issues, such as
advocacy for using fewer plastic bags and eating vegetarian food, and conducting
professional environmental assessments for government projects. Green groups,
some of them funded by major real estate corporations in Hong Kong, have cut off
their campaigns from critique of developmentalism and from engaging with major
socio-political issues in the city. The result is that the green movement has focused
on concerns of middle-class lifestyle consumption, sometimes even running the