CHASING CREATIVITY - AN INVESTIGATION OF HONG KONG �S NOHO DISTRICT AS A CREATIVE MILIEU

Abstract

Since its introduction in 1980s, creativity was regarded as an ingredient that many cities adopt as a method to regenerate and rejuvenate city life. Alongside with cultures, these acts together create a social construct of lifestyle patterns that generates social dynamism. Hence identities are constructed and reconstructing themselves, juxtaposing itself in relations to space, time and cultural influences. This also results in a change in our understanding towards the environment, breeding new focus on the way we see older buildings, architecture and the urban culture. The paper investigates the growth of creative milieu, in a challenged environment that is endowed with steep topographical terrains, one in which its city is highly dense, intense, diverse and saturated – Hong Kong. It focuses on how these characteristics, that is all so ordinary and common in the cities’ context become an important asset that challenged the construction of the creative milieu. Through looking at the patterns and structure of the city, focussing on NoHo and its neighbourhood the paper seeks to understand and examine how the city harnesses on the in-built infrastructure of the site and tap onto the open-mindedness and ideas of the people to transform and re-adapt spaces from one that is already saturated to one that gradually creates a new creative identity for itself. The paper would explore into Charles Landry’s “Hard” and “Soft” infrastructure as an analytical tool, a basis to understand the NoHo district as a creative milieu.