New Alternative Nigerian Architecture (NANA): Reclaiming Identity through Context and Material

Eunice Seng

This lecture navigates the spatial narratives of precarity in the multi-story mansions of Hong Kong's Kowloon peninsula. It investigates how the buildings' raison d'être is contingent on Cold War geopolitics, colonial governance, and the mechanisms regulating density. Examining these buildings as archives and nexus of identities, politics, and genealogies offer a lens to understand the socially transformative displacements of the people and their urban and domestic experiences predicated on negotiations, exclusions, seized and missed opportunities. 

Eunice Seng is Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at HKU. She is the founding principal of SKEW Collaborative, and a founding member of Docomomo Hong Kong. Her research and scholarship focus on historical contingency and the built environments in Asia and Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on agency and migrancy, housing, public space, labor, and women in architectural work. She is the author of Resistant City: Histories, Maps, and the Architecture of Development and is currently working on a book project, Housing Contingency, investigating Hong Kong's urban housing development.