ABSTRACT
Hong Kong is a city in which intense artificiality belies the simple divisions between public and private that tend to dominate the politics of the interior. Politics are practiced in the public 'sphere in Hong Kong in part because the city has so few traditional spaces of state power as understood in either the Eastern or the Western canon. The public 'spheres of Hong Kong demonstrate a divergence between the "indoors" and the "interior". Interior urbanism is not an urbanism of the indoors, but an urbanism in which indoors and outdoors no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions in the city. The pedestrian networks stretching for kilometers across Hong Kong create an urbanism of continuous "interiority" that does not always correlate to the "indoors". City Hall was replaced by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1933, and is presently the site of the HSBC Main Building, completed in 1985.
