Immigration, employment, and new town initiatives in Hong Kong

The forces that drove the birth of Kwun Tong new town in Hong Kong are not comprehensively understood. Previous historical narratives have magnified the impact of industrialization or laissez-faire liberalism. This article looks at the formation of Kwun Tong new town from the perspective of migration and employment, and reveals that employment acted as a catalyst to resettlement. The production of space theory and investigation of British colonial archival documents, proposal maps, and aerial photographs reveal that new town planning unfolded relative to spatial coding in Ngau Tau Kok and urban practice in Shek Kip Mei, showing historical continuity. The social and political dynamics of immigrants and how they interactively influenced the built-environment and resettlement are highlighted in this article. Under morphological analysis, critical changes in urban form provide other angles from which to understand how the new town was shaped. In addition, morphological analysis provides a spatial dialectics, filling the research gap of town planning in Hong Kong in the 1950s.