ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of shared structures of attention and the Hong Kong city. The term structures of attention' affords a description of how people produce and consume the idea of the city by paying emotional attention to it, as well as by the attention they pay through their professional practice. The art historian Jonathan Crary describes attention' as a condition of living in modernity. Williams is positive towards structures of feeling where they support communities of interest, and are in a fluid relationship with the pragmatics of community life. The idea of Hong Kong is of a city that is growing increasingly self-aware and learning to pay nostalgic but sharp attention to the minutiae of its character. In Hong Kong at that time and, arguably, still today it was necessary to intuit and define structures of attention that were responsive to the political, social, and historical interests of residents and citizens at a time of crisis.
