Unruly Places: Urban Governance and the Persistence of Illegality in Hong Kong's Urban Squatter Areas

Our knowledge of the governance of cities has expanded in recent years with the application of Foucauldian approaches. However, the majority of such work has concentrated on areas where governmental control is heightened, such as prisons and asylums. In this article, I discuss unruly places where governments have less control than usual: squatter settlements. Hong Kong has had substantial numbers of squatters throughout its postwar rise from dire poverty to contemporary prosperity. This article draws on documentary analysis and field research from 1982–85 and 1999–2000 to examine changes in the way that the government attempts to regulate these illegally occupied spaces and the ways in which interaction between administrative interventions and the responses of those living there makes the persistence of illegal occupation possible. I argue that three different phases of regulation can be identified: repression, resettlement, and exclusion. While there is considerable continuity in some practices of intervention such as toleration, the nature and outcomes of such practices vary with the changing context and other features of the regulatory regime, regulation, squatters, governance, illegality, Hong Kong