Repairing the Hong Kong Society: Community Projects as a Way of Commoning

In response to a series of social and political crises, a wide range of community-oriented projects have emerged in Hong Kong over the past two decades, making the city a new frontier of the commons movement in Asia. Ranging from cooperatives, social enterprises, to various community programmes, those projects differ from each other in terms of their scale, focus, and governance. Despite their diversity, those projects accumulate a young generation of practitioners sharing common visions to redefine and rebuild "community" (社區) in a city that is facing profound social transformation.

This paper aims to examine the everyday practice of community projects in current Hong Kong by focusing on three cases: Repair Café HK (復修辦館) in Kowloon, Window and Alley (窗後) in Hong Kong Island, and Tin Zi Zok Wai (天姿作圍) in New Territories. Inspired by Richard Sennett (2008; 2013) 's writings, we consider such efforts of community-building as a type of "repairing" the Hong Kong society, which not only reconfigures the materiality of everyday life but also reconstructs the social relations and imaginations. In this sense, we argue that repairing is also a process of commoning for a city at a moment of transition.