Colourful Play in Hong Kong’s Rainbow Estate

The appeal of Choi Hung Public Housing Estate as a place to live, let alone play, is not obvious. Although it consists of relatively low-rise buildings by Hong Kong standards, an American or British visitor to the estate (whose imagined home might be countrified suburbia) would marvel at how so many people could live in such a crowded environment (some of the apartments are a mere 200 square feet). The estate is surrounded by major road arteries so that the sound of grinding traffic is always present. In fact, for students, staff and faculty at the nearby Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (where some of us teach or study), Choi Hung is simply a place that one passes through, a place of transition from the scenic Clear Water Bay area of the New Territories (with its country parks) to Hong Kong’s touristic shopping district, Tsim Sha Tsui, and then on to its commercial district of Central and Admiralty, which houses the glass corporate banking towers so emblematic of modern Hong Kong.

Hawker stalls jostle uneasily with convenience stores and those selling unhealthy snacks. The buildings are old and dilapidated, with peeling paint and slabs of concrete about to fall. Typhoon-damaged trees and crumbling walls are propped up with pillars. Even the much-lauded common space, the rooftop that sports a basketball court and public seating areas, offers no respite from the humidity, blistering heat, heavy rain and typhoons that frequent the territory. The greasy smell of cooking oil and bus fumes waft over the estate. The design of the middle-band secondary school, of which we got a brief glimpse, is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s conception of the panopticon, a courtyard surrounded by classrooms. Upon our field visits we noticed gender and racial segregation. Men sat with men. Women with women. A small group of South Asian youngsters can occasionally be seen smoking together in a quiet corner, secluded from the other residents. Groups who share a particular Chinese dialect sit with each other. A tour guide did not hide his frustration with what he saw to be the clumsy behaviour and dowdy attire of newly arrived migrants from the Chinese mainland. When visiting the estate without a tour guide, residents viewed us with some suspicion when we approached, and security guards once briskly escorted us out of a residential block that we surreptitiously entered out of curiosity.

Choi Hung Public Housing Estate is indeed the antithesis to the kind of place in which many middle-class residents (such as the teachers we met in the school) aspire to live. More desirable are apartments of over 1,000 square feet located further away from the commercial parts of the city that overlook greenery and have club facilities and fitness centres. Such real estate is often situated above air-conditioned shopping malls selling brand-name products, directly connected by tunnels to subway stations, so that residents never need to face the elements of Hong Kong’s oppressive climate.¹Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon and Clara Wong, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (ORO editions, 2012).

Colour and play

How, then, do urban spaces like Choi Hung estate become places of play – a place that provides more than functional accommodation, a place that offers aesthetic appeal, invites exploration, participation, curiosity and mystery? In part, our answer begins with Johan Huizinga’s influential theorisation of play, that it is of the utmost importance and despite our assumption, an act that should be taken with the most serious gravity.²Johan H. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Angelico Press, 2016). He makes the bold case that we infuse play in all we do. We are homo ludens. As we shall see, Choi Hung is a playful endeavour: its name is playful, its colour scheme is playful, and as a functional place to live it is as much a site of routine and practical necessity as it is leisure and ludos. This is part of what play theorists have sought to capture – that you can plan for play, but play is also organic and, in some contexts, inspirational without an original intent. Quentin Stevens has demonstrated that shared public space is inherently playful, and that such affordance of playful potential enhances shared identity, and life quality.³Quentin Stevens, The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces (Routledge, 2007).

Contextualising how urban spaces become playful is a question that has only become more urgent as we collectively face climate change and environmental crisis. Now, the city and its promise of progress is likely to be associated with pollution, stress, political polarisation and conflict. As Des Fitzgerald argues, the city has become a place of anxiety where refuge from its oppression has been projected toward the supposed idyl of nature.⁴Des Fitzgerald, The City of Today is Dying Thing (Faber & Faber, 2024). Yet cities are also sites of hopes and aspirations, and mediated versions of cities as leisurely, healthy, and colourful occupy content feeds across all networked and social media. A body of literature has identified the prominence of social media in amplifying the importance of novel eye-catching “instagrammable” destinations where photos, geotags, and influencer endorsements remake and reimagine previously overlooked locations.⁵Referring to it being worthy to post on Instagram. See Colin Campbell et al., “That’s So Instagrammable! Understanding How Environments Generate Indirect Advertising by Cueing Consumer-Generated Content,” Journal of Advertising 51, no. 4 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2022.2053901. And with regards to gentrification in Hong Kong, see Yi Jian, Caterina Villani, Mia Borch Münster and Kin Wai Michael Siu, “‘There are more Instagrammers than coffee beans’”: Retracing Wang-Hong Urbanism in Hong Kong,” 15th Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism-IFOU (2022). The initial call for papers for this dossier included just such a rendering, a high contrast photo of the Choi Hung rooftop playground in Hong Kong. A photo much alike the one now used in the header of this article, and indistinguishable from the scores you will see if you choose to Google image search ‘Choi Hung Estate’. This is part of our quest in this short article: to position this vibrant image and imagining of the estate in its broader context.

The task of making cities playable has been a focus of urban designers and play scholars, often with a primary focus on youth.⁶Hugh Davies, Larissa Hjorth and Sybille Lammes, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities: Rethinking Urban Play, Civic Engagement, and Socio-spatiality,” Space and Culture27, no. 2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312231159228. Colour has always played a role, but now with environmental degradation and a prominent focus on lifelong health and wellbeing, colour has come to the fore. Cities are now projects of transformation seeking to become both physically and ideologically green.⁷Melissa Garcia-Lamarca et al., “Urban green boosterism and city affordability: For whom is the ‘branded’ green city?,” Urban Studies 58, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019885330; Christine Haaland and Cecil Konijnendijk van den Bosch, “Challenges and strategies for urban green-space planning in cities undergoing densification: A review,” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 14, no. 4 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2015.07.009. In this piece, we harness colour quite differently, arguing that a public housing estate, one of the most banal features of urban planning, can invigorate understandings of wellbeing, leisure, and play in the city. Our focus, Choi Hung estate, is a 60-year-old collection of tower blocks housing approximately 43,000 people. Located on the Kowloon peninsula of Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated urban environments in the world, Choi Hung takes its name from the Cantonese term for Rainbow (彩虹).

Riffing on the colourful name we place our analysis amidst the emerging debate on chromatic leisure.⁸See Alison Stenning, “Children’s play in grey spaces: ludic geographies and the chromatic turn,” Leisure Studies (2025),https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2025.2466497; Christopher Giamarino, “City of Courts: Excavating the Future in West Los Angeles,” Leisure Studies (2025): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2025.2455595; Abigail Karas, ““Grey is all that is depressing and dull”: the chromatic landscapes of rooftop exploration in St Petersburg and the “grey spaces” of leisure in the Capitalocene,” Leisure Studies (2025): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2025.2481572. From this perspective, colour is not only a perceptual property of objects as they reflect light, but also an open signifier. Most obviously, the planners and occupants of spaces associate blue and green spaces with health and wellbeing. Of particular interest to the scholars of chromatic leisure, however, are “grey spaces.” Traditionally, we associate greyness in cities with concrete, pollution, artificiality, homogenization, uniformity, seriousness, utilitarianism and business (as in grey suits). Yet, as folklore dictates, there can be many “shades of grey.” If a point of law is considered a “grey area,” it opens the possibility that there can be diverse interpretations. Similarly, theorists of chromatic leisure point out that grey can be ambiguous, contested and hybrid. Under certain circumstances, grey space can be appropriated as accessible and democratic, in opposition to the ways in which green and blue spaces have become gentrified and valorised by elites.⁹Seung Kyum Kim and Longfeng Wu, “Do the Characteristics of New Green Space Contribute to Gentrification?,” Urban Studies 59, no. 2 (2021): 360-280, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098021989951; Sarah Dooling, “Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research33, no. 3 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00860.x.

The use of bright colours in traditionally grey spaces heralds playfulness. Bright colours signify youth, energy, renewal and of course play. It is children with whom we associate brightly coloured clothes, toys and playground attractions.¹⁰Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisments (Harper and Row, 1976). Colour can also be political, representing irreverence, reclamation and reconstitution. Political commentators use the term “colour revolution” to describe the non-violent popular uprisings that occurred in post-Soviet states signalling an end to the bleak homogeneity associated with communism. The Rainbow flag similarly challenges conventional binaries and draws our attention to a broad spectrum of sexualities.

Two recent articles on chromatic leisure have particular relevance to our discussion. In exploring the transformations of an LA public space, Christopher Giamarino identifies how the shifting colours of the space relate to transformations in public/private ownership.¹¹Giamarino, “City of courts: excavating the future in West Los Angeles.” In this way colour comes to be symbolic of the ways in which play, in his discussion it is skateboarding, unfolds with different forms of public and private ownership of the space. In a very different context Abigail Karas looks to the rooftops of St Petersburg, where young people escape the constraints of a dull grey city in which the only form of play appears to be consumption.¹²Karas, ““Grey is all that is depressing and dull””. By ascending to the sky, the “Roofers” can transcend the banality and oppression of life below and develop an invigorated sensory engagement with the city. In Choi Hung, both paint and roofs become relevant and contrast with these other conceptualisations of chromatic leisure.

Understanding how the 60-year-old collection of tower blocks that comprise Choi Hung estate became a playful space through colour requires an understanding of how the estate is narrated in the imaginations of developers, social media influencers, tour guides, tourists other visitors and workers from outside the estate, in contrast to the experiences of those who actually live in the estate.

A break from the past

Following the Second World War, over a million refugees entered the then British territory, settling in make-shift shanty towns with poor living conditions and safety risks. While public housing was not unknown to Hong Kong before this period, a fire that ripped through one such squatter settlement on Christmas day in 1953 displacing over fifty thousand residents prompted the British colonial government to embark on a systematic housing programme. Yet the early “resettlement” estates immediately after the fire were simply holding facilities. Entire families were crammed into 100-square-feet apartments with outdoor kitchens and shared toilets.¹³Andy Lo, “This Iconic Hong Kong Instagram Spot will Soon be Demolished”, YouTube, accessed April 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31y3KJiZgA&t=35s. Indeed, older Hong Kong residents recall the resettlement centres as being places of danger and crime.

Recognizing the need for more “innovative” solutions, the Housing Authority contracted Palmer and Turner, one of the oldest architecture firms in Hong Kong, to whom the Authority granted “freedom” to explore “new design concepts” in public housing. Built in 1962 in the then rural district of Nga Chi Wan, the Choi Hung Estate is described in documentaries as offering “a significant improvement over cramped and unsanitary conditions of previous resettlement estates”; each apartment contained its own kitchen and toilet, with common areas for children to play.¹⁴Andy Lo, “This Iconic Hong Kong Instagram Spot will Soon be Demolished”, YouTube, accessed April 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31y3KJiZgA&t=35s.

This moment in Hong Kong history corresponds with a developing trajectory and investment in Hong Kong people. Public playgrounds had been developed in the 1920s in response to the curtailing of child labour and a need to offer place to play beyond the street.¹⁵Hugh Davies and Fan Lok Yi, “Space for Play: A History of Hong Kong Playgrounds,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312231210167. Aside from the recognition of this emergent need for playful spaces, Hugh Davies and Fan Lok Yi argue that the abstract expressionist art popular among urban planners at the time was also ideologically linked to Western freedom and unbridled creative expression – a tonic to the totalitarian rule of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party.¹⁶Hugh Davies and Fan Lok Yi, “Space for Play: A History of Hong Kong Playgrounds,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312231210167. Indeed, a commemorative plaque on the estate mentions that the estate won architectural awards for its innovative design accommodating housing and leisure. Historical photos can be found on the estate and there are websites devoted to it, which show Richard Nixon (later to become the US President) playing badminton with the residents when he visited the estate, as well photos of Princess Margaret visiting residents in their homes. Both events are visible reminders of Hong Kong as a Western outpost.

From playable to instagrammable

Central to the appeal of the estate for commentators, media influencers and residents alike is the estate’s unique colour scheme. Choi Hung literally means rainbow in Cantonese (the locally spoken Chinese dialect in Hong Kong). This was because rainbows could often be seen soaring above the estate. The original estate was a simple two-tone, grey and white. But in 1994, the Housing Authority appropriated the rainbow theme by painting the estate in the seven colours of the rainbow, which was later reduced in 2014 to five colours.¹⁷TVB News, “Sunday Report”, accessed April 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da4l0se4yBw. Rainbows, according to our tour guide, represent “vibrancy”. Contrasting the changing colour scheme with eras of Hong Kong history, as Giamarino does with the ownership of the LA Courthouse,¹⁸Giamarino, “City of Courts”. might be a bit of a reach. Yet it is relevant that the initial grey and white corresponds with the functional development of public housing. The transformation to seven colours in 1994 happens to coincide with a burgeoning Hong Kong identity prior to the 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty.¹⁹See Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong University Press, 1997); see also John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2007). The 1990s was also a boom time of wealth and prosperity in Hong Kong that was always on display, perhaps justifying the seven shades of paint. By 2014, however, the seven shades had been reduced to five, perhaps a practical approach for a territory more financially cautious following SARS, the global financial crisis, and greater economic integration with China.

While this rainbow colouring signifies Choi Hung to outsiders, the rainbow estate has other coloured and numerical indices for locals. Residents and tour-guides play word games when describing the geography of the estate. The overall site is colloquially known as the “Seven Eleven” (after the ubiquitous convenience store found throughout the city), representing the seven streets and eleven blocks that comprise the estate. A unique nomenclature of the buildings has been created from colours and flowers. Buildings are named in two Chinese characters, the first being a colour, the second a flower, e.g 紅萼樓 (red Rhododendron building).

In describing the evolution of the estate, a narrative of play prevails over that of utility and efficiency, particularly when new practical demands impinge upon the estate. In its original design, according to a tour guide, the estate contained a park with trees and playground equipment (the same roundabouts and swings that could be found in British parks in the 1970s). When residents became wealthier in the 1980s and could afford cars, a covered car park was built in its place. However, instead of abandoning the original recreational space, a park was built on top of the newly built car park. A commitment to play space therefore endured.²⁰Davies and Yi, “Space for Play”.

This “rooftop” is known throughout Hong Kong as a popular photo-taking spot which provides direct views of the brightly coloured buildings. Again, these photographers are drawn to the estate because of its colours. But they are not just observers and reporters of the estate’s exuberance. They actively participate in its narration by posting pictures of themselves against the backdrop on social media (Instagram, TikTok, and Xiaohongshu), as if to announce their discovery and appreciation of it. One German tourist that we met, armed with a sophisticated long-lens camera, invited us to take photos of him embedded in various parts of the estate. “What do you plan to do with the photos?” we asked. He was a dentist in Germany. He was visiting other iconic colourful estates in Hong Kong and would post the photos in the waiting room of his surgery, hoping that it would be a point of interest for his patients. Such a point of interest is, at heart, a playful gesture seeking to communicate inspiration to others, just as the dentist wishes to not simply offer a photo but also an entry for conversation and even the sharing of his own travels and hobbies. Social media users are engaged in the same praxis when they share photos of Choi Hung, too. Instagram and other social media platforms have powerful tools in urban placemaking, creating new and often unpredictable hubs of interest in sightseeing, commerce, and traffic congestion.²¹Zhang, Amy Y., Asa Roast, and Carwyn Morris. “Wanghong Urbanism: Towards a New Urban-Digital Spectacle.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 7, no. 4 (November 2022). This relates to research in which collaborators used Instagram posts to capture what they creatively saw as play potentials.²²Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Laia Turmo Vidal, Ella Dagan, Jared Duval, Elena Márquez Segura and Katherine Isbister, “Chasing Play with Instagram: How Can We Capture Mundane Play Potentials to Inspire Interaction Design?” (Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382913. Simply the act of sharing uneventful objects creates a juxtaposition, opening up possibilities to others. Just as a child might invite another to play in the act of pretending, an Instagram post is a prompt about what someone else is encountering, an invitation to see where they have been, what they have encountered and to connect. If we accept the premise that humans are attuned to act playfully,²³Bertran et al., “Chasing Play with Instagram”, 3; see also Huizinga, Homo Ludens. then social media becomes a way to make the city more playful too. But just as the city provides obstacles, dangers, and frustrations, so too does digital communication. Our connections to others are increasingly mediated and orchestrated via algorithms by which users negotiate their visibility and identity.²⁴Kelley Cotter, “Playing the Visibility Game: How Digital Influencers and Algorithms Negotiate Influence on Instagram,” New Media & Society 21, no. 4 (2018): 895–913. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818815684. Popular posts of Choi Hung’s colourful estate create algorithmic visibility which draws people to the location. They in turn have curated a colourful, playful image of the estate which we balance here with our more quotidian analysis.

Aside from foreign tourists, local visitors use the estate to develop a well-known “localist” narrative about Hong Kong’s distinctiveness from China that emerged in the late 1960s, in which the first generation of locally born Hong Kong Chinese began to articulate Hong Kong as being distinct from China by virtue of its language, politics and cosmopolitanism.²⁵Gordon Mathews, “Hèunggóngyàhn: On the past, present, and future of Hong Kong identity”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29:3 (10997): 3–13. One such photographer that we encountered, who was visiting the estate from her home in Mid-levels, a wealthy residential district on Hong Kong island, placed the estate as “representative” of Hong Kong, with its bright colours resisting what she feared as homogenization from the Chinese mainland. “I have been to China before. I feel it is very different from Hong Kong. In HK we have a diverse culture, and I just know that this cultural difference is obvious,” she told us. Here, the colourful rooftop recreational space compares with the ‘Roofers’ who escape the homogenisation of contemporary capitalist Russia.²⁶Karas, ““Grey is all that is depressing and dull’”. Rooftop play is symptomatic of Hong Kong, a city imagined as being without ground²⁷Frampton, Solomon and Wong, Cities without Ground. where walkways, mezzanines, and underground passes are a defining feature of everyday life. The etymology of playground does not quite capture leisure in Hong Kong where the ground is simply superfluous.

The rooftop with its colourful vistas is celebrated not just as a tourist attraction, but also as part of the very fabric of the communal life of the estate. At night, under powerful floodlights, it supports a plethora of activity groups that include teenagers playing basketball, female dance-groups, groups of three or four women chatting in the Chinese dialect of their hometowns, groups of women stretching or powerwalking around the perimeter, and groups of men smoking. Taking the estates’ exceptionalism to a metaphysical level, our tour guide explained how residents are protected by the iconic Lion Rock (a mountain that resembles a lion sitting with is head facing West) that looms over the estate, in accordance with traditional Chinese custom of fengshui (in which attention is paid to the orientation of buildings in relation to the environment to create harmony and maximise energy flows).

Those familiar with the estate’s architecture point out that whereas the newer housing estates prioritize efficiency by creating the largest number of residential units in the given space, at Choi Hung, units on higher floors (which do not have immediate access to the rooftop) are deliberately left vacant to provide children with common areas to play. There are also rooms on the estate that are set aside for specific activities: a chess room and, most impressively of all, a table tennis room, which, according to one documentary, was among the first to appear in a public housing estate.²⁸TVB News, “Sunday Report”. While many housing estates now have a public table tennis room, the Choi Hung table tennis room has such notoriety that it attracts players from other housing estates. As our tour guide explained, the table room is up to “international standards” by virtue of its ventilation, flooring, and security guards who check in regularly for safety and maintenance. Indeed, during our visits the tables were usually occupied, equally, with both men and women, as well as children.

The estate offers more than leisure and accommodation. It is also a place for commerce and shopping. Enthusiasts of the estate exceptionalize the estate’s political economy as one that serves the people of the estate, rather than the profits of the large monopolies that govern groceries and dining in Hong Kong. The manager of a credit union in the estate explained to us that the estate is governed by the Housing Authority (in contrast to the property developers that run other estates). While the main supermarket chains would be willing to pay higher rents for the space, the housing authority keeps the rent affordable for local vendors.

The result is a bazaar of eclectic shops, hawker stalls and restaurants, often run by elderly residents or former residents of the estate. Such shops include one that used to sell vintage alarm clocks, but upon the rise of digital timekeepers on phones, expanded its inventory to include eyewear. Its 90-year-old owner, colloquially known as 李老闆 (Boss Lee) has worked at the shop since 1964. Another store, a comic-book shop, specializes in Japanese anime where comics could be rented rather than purchased to preserve access to rare comics. There is also a fifty-year-old Shanghainese-style men’s barber salon with vintage black-and-white tiled floor and original chairs imported from Shanghai (once featured in Time Out magazine and used as the backdrop to music videos) and a stationery store with school supplies that pre-date the digital era: pens, pencils, ink and erasers. Outside are old-style vending machines that sell toys in bright red plastic pods. There is also a membership supermarket, a cooperative for elderly, low- income residents and new migrants. The dexterity and ingenuity of these boutique businesses is often noted. A bread store becomes a stationery store, or as noted earlier, an antique clock store becomes an eyewear store.

Moving forward, looking back and the fading of colour

In the last few years, affection for the estate has grown, as the HKSAR government announced plans for its redevelopment, largely due to the aging infrastructure (falling concrete and water leakages) and the increasing value of the land, which could be leveraged for greater profits from taller buildings. The high profile of Choi Hung, enhanced by Instagram photos turning up the contrast of its now fading paint, correspond with another dynamic in the territory. Ackbar Abbas has argued that the fast-paced style to Hong Kong and its dense compressed living results in an oversensitisation.²⁹Abbas, Hong Kong Culture. Hong Kong becomes somewhat invisible until a moment of rupture reminds people of what has always been quotidian. This politics of disappearance seems to be off-balance in Choi Hung, which is romanticised by outsiders but dealt with pragmatically by residents. Despite a growing interest in the estate from news media and social media, few of the residents we spoke to seemed particularly concerned about the estate’s redevelopment. Elderly residents explained to us that the re-development was likely to take place gradually over several decades, so that it would not affect them in their lifetime. Besides, they saw it as inevitable and felt that there was nothing they could do about it.

Younger residents, such as Victor, a man in his late twenties who had grown up and attended school on the estate, viewed it just as a place to provide his basic needs, a place to sleep. Aside from one or two old school friends from the estate, he spent most of his time with friends in Tsim Sha Tsui, the retail and restaurant district in Hong Kong where he worked. He was also attracted by the various government incentives to assist residents of the estate to purchase newer properties at discounted prices in a more sanitary environment, with newer buildings and facilities that, as described earlier, middle-class residents in Hong Kong prefer.

Whether the estate’s development is viewed with indifference, fatalism, or even optimism, Choi Hung remains a fossilized version of Hong Kong’s past for many tourists, bloggers and media influencers, who believe that the government used to care more for the welfare of its citizens, meaning that affordable accommodation and community were placed above commercial interest. In this idealized version of the past, children played outside, enjoyed simpler pursuits such as comic books and plastic toys rather than video games, and ate snacks from street-side vendors (rather than fast-food chains), while local businesses thrived instead of ubiquitous chain stores.

To return to our original question: What makes a playful urban environment? What sequence of events, activities and discourses had to happen to make Choi Hung estate the place it is now? Firstly the sequence of events can be simply recapped. A break from the past – the fiery rapture of the Shep Kip Mei that levelled the squatter huts and forced government intervention. This saw a rejection of the purely utilitarian nature of the early resettlement estates followed by a break in standard housing estate protocols, outsourcing flexible design to property developers. This in turn led to the development of a narrative among residents, tourists, heritage promoters, media and social media influencers to frame what some might consider a ramshackle collection of dilapidated buildings, hawker stores and unprofitable shops as emblematic of Hong Kong’s collective life outside the inevitable encroachment of modernity and homogenization. Nestled in this sequence is something hopeful, perhaps playful. We can observe the organic creativity of human meaning making. The generative of narratives to emerge in the most banal of settings. It is difficult to not be romantic about the way transient places become prominent and beloved to Hong Kongers.³⁰Zhou, Grace Yixian. “The Instagram Pier: Negotiating Public Space in Hong Kong.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 8, no. 4 (November 2023). Choi Hung is beloved as an unremarkable collection of concrete housing blocks, reimagined as the rainbow, a symbol of hope. Like other parts of the territory, both concrete and imaginary, it is ephemeral. A simple answer to the question of what makes a city playful it its people. Simply give them the chance.

Paul O’Connor

Paul O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter. His recent research has theorised chromatic leisure through the material and symbolic exploration of the grey spaces of urban life.

Julian Mcallister Groves

Julian M. Groves is an Associate Professor of Social Science education in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published widely on the topics of education, youth, migration, gender, and popular culture in Hong Kong.

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Yingxin Du

Yingxin Du is a postgraduate student at the School of Humanities and Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests are gender and organizational studies.

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Tina Sze Nga Ho

Tina Sze Nga Ho is an undergraduate student at the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is currently pursuing her studies in sociology.

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