Introduction
Walter Benjamin and the phantasmagoric urbanism of Hong Kong: Photographic Installation for the future of Chinese urbanity
瓦爾特 本雅明與光怪陸離的香港城市主義 ：為了未來中國城市性的照相裝置展
The Arcade/Border/City group is an independent, cross-disciplinary collective set up in 2013 in Hong Kong by graduate students and young scholars with the purpose of navigating critically Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk through everyday life experiences in Hong Kong. We interrogate the ways in which the architectural forms of contemporary urbanism (arcades, borders, citylinks, metro systems, streets, footbridges, and so on) are connected to, or disjointed from, the layered networks of mobility, media, affect, representation and desire that shape individual lives in metropolitan agglomerations.
《商場／邊境／城市》 小組是一個獨立的，跨學科的組織。這個組織由一群研究生和年輕學者與2013年成立，其目的是為通過本雅明的《拱廊計劃》批判的理解香港的日常生活。我們質問當代的建築形式（比如，商場，邊境，城市鏈接，地鐵系統，街道，天橋等）如何從不同層面的構成在結塊都市中個體生活的機動性，媒體，情緒，表現與慾望。
Our project is to represent a photographic/visual installation, a collage of more or less loose visual narratives of the past and present Hong Kong urban images compiled by the authors and coupled with passages from the Passagenwerk as well as other key works in architecture and urban space (such as Koolhas and Lefebvre), is a report on our forays into the academic texts, urban wandering, archive delving and intellectual exchanges. The dialogic nature of this collage, combining personal points of view, digital imaging, individual trajectories and fragmented readings, wants to echo the unfinished, open-ended nature of Benjamin’s text, and attempts a practical interpretation of the blurry concept of “dialectical image”.
我們的計劃是為了展出一個照相／視覺的裝置，拼貼一些看似散漫的視覺敘事, 結合我們收集的香港過去與現在的城市景象與《拱廊計劃》還有其他有關建築與城市空間的書籍（比如，庫哈斯與列斐伏爾）中的段落。這個報告結合我們研究學術著作，城市漫步，瀏覽檔案和交流討論。這個以對話為本質的拼接，結合個人觀點，電子圖像，個人軌跡和非系統的閱讀，就是為了迴響本雅明文字本身的開放性，嘗試用實踐來理解“辯證的圖像”這個模糊的概念.
We believe the trajectory of development of Hong Kong’s urban space is a crucial reference to the mainland Chinese counterpart. A spatialogy of Hong Kong is not necessarily a blueprint for the future of Chinese megacities (even sometimes it was wrongly perceived as such) but many lessons can be learnt from our study of lived experiences of architectural forms and urban planning in the past and present.
我們認為香港城市空間的發展是內地城市的重要參照。一個香港的空間學並不一定是中國巨型城市的藍圖（甚至有時候被錯誤的這樣理解）但是我們可以從研究親身經歷香港的過去與現在的建築形式和城市規劃中學習到很多。
