Negotiating "space" of grassroots by community bazaar: A case of community economic development strategy for advocating community bazaar policy in Hong Kong

In the context of economic restructuring and post-industrial society, the poverty situations of remote new towns in Hong Kong, such as Tin Shui Wan and Tung Chung, have revealed the failure of the governmental policies in urban planning and resulted in the grassroots residents experiencing diminishing local jobs opportunities and high transport costs for cross-district employment as well as the exceptionally high living costs. The infrastructures of these residential-based new towns have transformed people’s lives from utilizing “street-markets” to standardized shopping malls. All these have regulated the people’s social and economic behaviours. Alongside the changes is the identification of early morning and late evening markets in old urban neighbourhoods and the traditional “illegal” street venders, mostly elderly, which were selling their low-end or second-hand products for the deprived groups in the nearby communities. These changes revealed how the disadvantaged groups were excluded from the mainstream economy. These phenomena in Hong Kong discloses the change in urban governance which has restricted the “space” or “livelihood environment” of the grassroots and deprived groups not only in economic forms but in their daily living as well. They have furthered the suffering of people and widening social inequalities.

This paper reviews the ten-year community bazaar practice of two local community work organizations in the remote new towns and old urban deprived neighbourhoods. Their work demonstrates how the bottom-up approach organized the “illegal” street venders and the local residents, encouraged participatory planning, and advocated for the ‘local community bazaar policy’. The paper reports on a study on these CED practices to contextualize the intervention and analyzes their strategies for negotiating “space” for the grassroots. It aims at critically reflecting upon the importance of intervening into economic development areas and the potential of CED for building social and economic alternatives and advocating community empowerment in the new urban political contexts.