Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing explores, through extensive examination of Hong Kong colonial government documents, how the government's policies towards squatters evolved between the 1960s and the 1980s. As the book's preface states, “After four decades of failing to end new squatting after the Second World War, and with their numbers climbing to over 750,000 in 1982, the colonial government finally succeeded after 1984” (iix) in solving this problem. This book explores how the colonial government succeeded in this effort, arriving at a solution that appears more haphazard than deliberate, but that nonetheless was effective.

Squatting – occupying an area of land that one does not own or have legal permission to use – bedevilled the postwar Hong Kong government. It tried several approaches to eradicate squatting, including simply destroying the structures and, after 1954, demolition followed by resettlement, but neither of these were effective in stemming the ongoing flood of new squatters. Alan Smart and Fung Chi Keung Charles reveal in their introduction that the eventual solution to the problem was the SOS, the Squatter Occupancy Survey in 1984–1985, which registered the residents of squatter areas rather than focusing on their structures alone, enabling an exact elucidation of who deserved resettlement and who did not. The task the book sets for itself is to explain how and why this policy was formulated, a surprisingly difficult undertaking given the gaps in relevant documents in Hong Kong government archives; even by book's end this cannot be conclusively answered without a degree of surmise.

Chapter two explores informality and how it permeated Hong Kong in postwar decades. The massive influx of immigrants from mainland China in 1949 marked the beginning of widespread squatting in Hong Kong, with neither the private sector nor the government able to provide sufficient housing, a situation which continued for decades thereafter, even after public housing was established in the 1950s. Chapter three considers geopolitical explanations for the emergence of public housing and the ending of the squatting problem in the 1980s, such as the common interests of London, Beijing and Hong Kong as Hong Kong's return to China was being negotiated, but finds no conclusive archival evidence for this explanation. Chapter four examines Hong Kong's situation in the early 1960s, including the contested clearance of the large Diamond Hill squatter area; chapter five considers the riots in Hong Kong of 1966 and 1967 and the reforms that took place thereafter, particularly in the growth of public housing, due in large part to pressure from London. Chapter six, using the framework of “policy mangles,” explores the government's discussion of allowing squatters to obtain title to the land they occupied, and construct formal dwellings; chapter seven examines how “public housing and squatter control policies adopted in the 1970s created serious imbalances in supply and demand,” particularly for temporary public housing (p. 128), exacerbated by natural disasters to which squatter areas were prone, such as fires and landslides.

Chapter eight considers the emerging sense of Hong Kong identity in the 1970s, and the growing resentment of long-term Hong Kong residents on the waiting list for public housing against mainland immigrant squatters thought to be “jumping the queue”; new government policy was formulated to favour the former over the latter, garnering public support in Hong Kong. Chapter nine considers the Squatter Area Improvement programmes in the early 1980s; chapter ten, finally, turns to the Squatter Occupancy Survey itself. The Survey effectively identified who actually lived in squatter areas in Hong Kong, involving a full census, and enabled the government to enact a policy that only those squatters who were identified in the survey as long-term residents could be considered for resettlement in permanent public housing in the future. This policy effectively ended new squatting in Hong Kong. Chapter 11 looks at the example of Hong Kong as compared to the management of squatting in other cities in Asia, including mainland Chinese cities, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Indian cities. Chapter 12's conclusion reflects upon the squatter problem as being like a balloon, where squeezing one area resulted in expansion in another, and emphasizes that while the SOS and ensuing government policies led to success, “no single explanation manages to account for the road to formalization” (p. 253). Today there are still many remaining squatters in Hong Kong, the chapter notes, but very few new squatters, despite Hong Kong having the world's highest rental prices per square meter in private housing and a wait of many years for public housing.

I found this book somewhat difficult to read because of its extended treatment of so many government policy discussions in the 1960s and 1970s, most of which never came to fruition; the non-specialist in Hong Kong housing and government policy may get lost at points within it. However, the book is quite valuable in its outlining of the complex ways in which policy unfolds – not through concerted and decisive long-term planning, in this case, but through conflicting policies, plans and pressures that in this case led to the right moment for a solution in 1984–1985. This is no doubt how policy very often unfolds in governments around the world, although we often may not be fully aware of it. Smart and Fung have done us a service in exploring the complex and convoluted processes of how squatter management policy evolved in Hong Kong – their portrayal has relevance beyond the immediate topic of this book.