EXTRASTATECRAFT — URBAN FACTORY

Masters Final Project by Terri Leung in the UMN MArch program GD3 MFP studio taught by Jennifer Yoos

Urban space has become an instrument that contains mobile and monetized technology. The globalizing world is being displayed through spatial information of infrastructure, architecture, and urbanism with an underlay of some patterns of trading instead of the language of law and diplomacy. One of the infrastructures, the free zone, was described by Keller Easterling as EXTRASTATECRAFT. The zone has developed drastically from an out-of-way area for manufacturing custom-free goods as a postwar surviving method to a model for thriving cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai. Easterling did not make a clear statement on whether it is bad or good; rather, he described how this phenomenon evolves over time. This project is looking at the city of Hong Kong and makes a change to this bleeding pattern of infrastructures. Ongoing trade war, Umbrella Revolution in 2014, Extradition Law in 2019, and the pandemic this year have evoked the problem of over-reliance from the thriving cities to the manufactory in developing countries (urbanspace-to-be).

What if one day the trade war becomes more serious, could people in Hong Kong still survive without the imported food? What if one day another wave of a pandemic comes, China or other countries are not capable of transporting goods, would the economy of Hong Kong die? What if the main ports in the world lost their resources, could developing cities pick up the manufacturing technology and speed to provide the city’s needs?