A r c h i t e c t u r e · CUH K · s p r i n g l e c t u r e
miles glendinng
The Hundred Years War: a century of mass-housing
“campaigns” across the world
Monday 18.02.2013
Within Hong Kong, there is justifiably a wide public awareness of the scale and boldness of the
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territory’s public housing achievement, which now spans well over half a century. But that very
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longevity, and special character, has also in some ways subtly ‘de-contextualised’ the housing pro-
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gramme, obscuring its many complex links and parallels with mass housing elsewhere in the world,
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both in earlier and in more recent years. This talk sketches out how it might be possible to set
Hong Kong’s extraordinary programme into a wider global framework, a global narrative of the
20th/21st century mass housing movement. This global narrative is concerned above all with
crises, struggles and battles - a fiercely-fought Hundred Years¹ War¹, often dominated by various
interpretations of ‘socialism’, yet whose latest and most dramatic campaigns, astonishingly, have
stemmed from the world¹s most extreme redoubts of free-market capitalism - Hong Kong and
Singapore.