Hong Kong is a city drawn in section—stacked, stepped, suspended. A culture of building that has learned to fold terrain and threshold into one continuous surface. Architecture here is not a discrete object but a system of adjacencies—markets pressed beneath housing blocks, temples nested into retaining walls, gardens hovering above malls. It is a vertical choreography, where the street has been lifted, buried, replicated, and rerouted. 

Its history plays out as a sequence of layers, traces, and ruptured chronologies. A British colonial outpost and financial port city, its civic and spatial rituals persist through abrupt political and material shifts. Buildings change function without changing form. Materials wear thin but do not disappear. Cultural continuity emerges less from institutions than from improvised design intelligence—embedded in everyday acts of repair, adaptation, and repetition. 

The city’s compacted form stages a kind of cultural compression—where public and private are never fully resolved, and architecture becomes a medium for negotiating cohabitation, tension, and visibility. The threshold is always in flux: a shop spilling into a corridor, a shrine tucked behind a gate, laundry tracing territorial claims across a shared façade. 

Situated on the southern rim of the Pearl River Delta—one of the most intensely urbanised geographies on earth—Hong Kong remains an anomaly. Its design culture resists the smoothness of the region’s emerging megacities. It is textured, improvised, and deeply local, even as it performs on a global stage. A peculiar urban literacy thrives here: one born of constrained geographies and abundant cultural nuance. 

This same literacy is now under pressure from the slow erasure of civic space, the standardisation of planning codes, and the soft violence of homogenised aesthetics. Does its architecture risk losing cultural intelligence to the logic of compliance? And is there still a culture capable of inhabiting the slippages—between east and west, past and future, resistance and assimilation? 

In this episode, we explore how architecture can operate as cultural infrastructure—supporting fragile economies, public life, and creative expression. We do so through the lens of COLLECTIVE, a Hong Kong-based architectural studio deeply engaged with cultural and spatial systems across Asia and beyond. We’re thrilled to welcome Betty Ng to the Super Urban Podcast.