This paper examines Hong Kong’s long history of land reclamation in Victoria Harbour as “harbourcide”: the slow, institutionally sanctioned killing of a harbour that has sustained the city’s breathing space, wind channel, and urban imaginary. It treats reclamation not simply as engineering or policy, but as a cultural, sensory, and more-than-human process that remakes bodies, ecologies, and collective memories. The argument foregrounds how projects justified in terms of land scarcity, housing, and infrastructure produce layered harms—-against air and water quality, marine and intertidal species, public space, and harbour-side communities—-while being narrated as inevitable urban progress. Bringing cultural studies into conversation with environmental humanities and science and technology studies, the paper reads reclaimed areas as hybrid aqua-landscapes composed of dredged sediments, toxic heavy metals, concrete seawalls, stressed marine life, and human bodies moving through altered sensory environments. It analyses legal and planning texts, media and activist representations, and emerging oral histories of pre reclamation shorelines as a vernacular archive of harbour memory that exceeds conventional, view-based heritage frameworks. The paper ultimately refigures harbourcide as a problem of more-than-human urbanity and asks what kinds of lives are rendered expendable in the name of “development” and “sustainability.” It concludes by sketching speculative scenarios in which Victoria Harbour is reimagined not as surplus space for infilling, but as a site of regenerative design, multispecies cohabitation, and renewed sensory and political attachment to the water.

Authors:
John Nguyet Erni, The Education University of Hong Kong, China

About the Presenter(s)
John Nguyet Erni is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong.

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