This building is the physical location through which many of the maids who come from Indonesia and The Philippines maintain their transnational linkages with home through the cash remitting, mailing and mobile phone services that are offered within the building. While Chung King Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui has been identified as a hub of low end globalisation, World Wide House is Hong Kong’s hub of Cosmopolitanism-from-below. That side of the street marks the distinctions between High End Hong Kong and the more accessible spaces of a more ordinary and older part of this city. Understanding who populates what appear to be anonymous buildings also helps to give understand and orientation to this place.Īcross the street from exit C is World Wide House, within this mall space located in the upper pedestrian areas, you will not find the designer brands that characterise the buildings to the west. Most noticeable is Louis Vuitton across the intersection. Looking toward the right you will see the large stores of the luxury designer brands. Behind you, and unseeable from this vantage, is The Peak, a place that at its heart was British as for many years only the colonial settlers were allowed to live there. This is a view toward the north, toward China. The expanse would have been quite big in those days as it took 40 minutes to cross on the Star Ferry (a trip that now takes about 10 minutes). From where you stand y ou would have seen across the Harbour to Kowloon. What a different view there must have been from this spot when Hong Kong was first settled. Everything between Des Voeux Road and what is Victoria Harbour now is reclaimed land. This street was the original shoreline of Victoria Harbour. For this understanding It helps to know a bit of the history that makes this place. One way to orient oneself upon arriving at street level from Exit C is to observe the trams running along the street. One needs to be able to read the streets and the buildings in an urban place, just like one reads the sky and the physical geography in the rural. To get a sense of where the compass points of north, south, east and west are in relation to where you stand in an urban environment takes other forms of knowledge. The old tricks learned in a childhood of looking for sun, wind direction, and and physical landscape do not work here as a means for orienting. The view itself has no depth as you are confronted with a billboard and a tall building. The experience of emerging onto street level from the exits of the Central MTR in Hong Kong still, for me, provide a feeling of disruption that is noticeable. Exit C is particularly problematic. Recognition is required in order to feel at home in a place such that the feeling of being startled is only fleetingly noticeable. But It takes time and familiarity to really know where you are located to get a sense of the place around you and to bring it into your psyche. The two are interrelated and the sooner one can do the second, the easier it is to do the first. Its the moment of becoming spatially located, but there is also the sense of locating in a place. There is the moment that occurs where you realise you can orient yourself and you know where you are going. It always takes a minute or more to adjust and locate. I always feel a bit dislocated when first exiting an underground public transport station, whatever city I am in.
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