Our urban history and heritage, according to UENESCO’s 2016 Global Report on Culture: Urban Futures, are key “assets” and “drivers” for urban sustainability and resilience and liveability. This project is devoted to exploring historical urbanisms from the perspective of sustainability and resilience. It also seeks the potential of such historical explorations for examining our assumptions about urban evolution, enriching debates and discourses on cities, reshaping urban theories, and facilitating imaginaries for our urban futures. The development of this project within HKIHSS has benefited enormously from the thriving and stimulating research on complex societies, cities, and urban heritage in different branches of the University of Hong Kong, e.g., the Centre for Quantitative History, the Urban Systems Institute, the Faculty of Architecture, the Department of Geography, and the Department of Art History.

The project was launched with a series of events in September. One was the International Symposium “Cities in Crisis: Planning and Design, Governance, and Daily Operations” held on Saturday 14 September 2024. The symposium brought together a group of urban and planning historians and urban studies scholars studying diverse urban crises in historical and contemporary cities in Asia, North America, and Europe. Professor Carola Hein from TU Delft delivered the keynote speech “Learning from the Past for Resilient Future: Valued-based Approaches as Foundation for Planning and Design”. This was joined by twelve panellists who gave presentations, including Professor Patrick Adler from the Department of Geography; Professor John Carrell, Jodie Cheng, and Professor Devika Shankar from the Department of History; and Professor Chao Ren, Professor Coke Roskin, Professor Eunice Seng, and Professor Tao Zhu and Xi Liao from the Faculty of Architecture (see the full symposium programme). The symposium focused on exploring the notion and nature of urban crises as perceived and represented by different urban stakeholders with diverse perspectives and discourses and the interaction of these in shaping how cities are planned, designed, governed, co-produced, lived, and rebuilt in historical and contemporary cities. It also explored how cities learn to approach crises as opportunities for change towards sustainable and resilient futures.

Another major launching event was the Public Lecture “Cities, Museums, and Memories: Urban Heritage in A Global Context” delivered by Dr Shengyu Wang, Associate Curator of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, on Friday 13 September 2024. The lecture focused on the establishing of the Palace Museum and its significance for the cultural and economic development of Hong Kong and Greater China and the promotion of a better understanding of Chinese culture and history in a global context (see the lecture abstract). The lecture was followed by a panel discussion led by Professor Florian Knothe, Director of the University of Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery. The launching events also included a roundtable event for scholars and postgraduate research students to present their work in progress on 13 September 2024.

The project website (www.fc-ppf.hku.hk) was launched soon after the September events.