About this Event
This documentary adopts a traditional historical approach, drawing on published sources and archival manuscripts from both Hong Kong and London. It explores five key themes: 1) water, infrastructure, and the environment; 2) water and society; 3) water, culture, and foodways; 4) water usage and management and 5) water and industries. By weaving these strands together, the documentary offers a timely and original contribution to the environmental, political, social, and economic history of Hong Kong. It also resonates with global conversations on climate change, highlighting how past strategies were developed to cope with water crises in a rapidly urbanising city with limited welfare provisions and a narrow tax base-conditions still mirrored in many regions today. Through historicising natural disasters and water emergencies, the documentary deepens academic discourse on environmental change and urbanisation, while offering valuable lessons for contemporary challenges. After the documentary, there will be a Q&A session in which the speakers will respond to questions from the audience.
Host:
Dr Asa Roast is an urban geographer with expertise in urbanisation, urban planning, alternative economics, peri-urban spaces, and contemporary China. His research asks what formal and informal systems emerge when people live together in shared space. Across the various research projects he has worked on—from fieldwork in Chinese cities to speculative game spaces—his work investigates the boundaries and breakdowns of formal systems: how infrastructures, imaginaries, and institutions produce spaces of creativity, improvisation, and possibility. His research has contributed insights to public and policy discussions on urban governance, housing, and the social impacts of planning.
Speakers:
Dr. Florence MOK is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong, modern China and British colonialism, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She is the author of Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97, published by Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series) in 2023 and the co-editor of A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945-1997, published by Hong Kong University Press in 2025.
Dr. Siu-hei LAI is Lecturer at Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. He is an anthropologist focusing on youth, aspiration and Chinese migration in Mainland Southeast Asia. Obtained his PhD in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong , his doctoral thesis examines how the young Yunnanese Chinese in the Thai-Burmese borderland pursue their aspirations by migrating within and beyond the borderland.
Mr. Sahil BHAGAT is a Research Associate in the History Department at Nanyang Technological University. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of St Andrews and a joint master’s degree from Columbia University and the London School of Economics (LSE). His work pertains to the transnational labour and environmental histories of plantation-based communities in British Malaya and Singapore.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Baines Wing Miall LT (2.34), Baines Wing, Woodhouse, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
