Citation:
Abstract:
This thesis investigates the interactions, tensions, and competing justifications for actions among stakeholders involved in the decade-plus conservation process of the historic Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong between 2007 and 2018.
I build on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which the different actors taking part in the Central Police Station conservation process engage in legitimacy-shaping discourses unique to Hong Kong’s contentious sociopolitical context and urban realm. I place Boltanski and Thévenot's framework in conversation with urban theory literature to analyze three periods of tension and controversy through the Central Police Station conservation process: initial debates over the proposed design, disagreements over the site’s proposed operator, and ongoing controversies over the site’s uses now that it is in operation.
Drawing upon extensive interviews with key stakeholders involved in the Central Police Station conservation process, as well as archival research, this thesis suggests that Hong Kong’s unique sociopolitical and geographic contexts gave rise in the mid-2000s to new discourses of justification and assertions of legitimacy over heritage that had not previously seen significant engagement in the public sphere. Given the relative newness of discourse over heritage in Hong Kong’s public sphere, an examination of the stakeholders involved in the Central Police Station conservation process reveals a process of self-education wherein stakeholders attempted to assert and maintain legitimacy while simultaneously still educating themselves about that over which they were asserting legitimacy. This thesis builds upon understandings of justification and legitimacy maintenance through assessing the ways in which various actors assert their legitimacy over a realm, in this case heritage preservation, where each actor has scant prior experience.