Agency In Appropriation:

Every Sunday, groups of Foreign Domestic Helpers (FDHs) collectively create informal territories within the urban fabric of Hong Kong’s Central Business District (CBD). FDHs are migrant workers living in Hong Kong who are legally bound to live in their employers’ homes. They work six days a week, and their duties and lifestyles are dictated by their employers, making them one of the most marginalised occupational groups in the city. Every Sunday – their day off – FDHs gather in public en masse to exercise freedom outside of their contractual confinement. In Hong Kong’s CBD these weekly assemblies of Filipino workers disrupt the city’s hegemonic spaces of financial capital. Various urban interior and exterior spaces – shop fronts, footpaths, elevated walkways and atriums – are appropriated and transformed with makeshift cardboard constructions. Hong Kong’s public-private zones are augmented into temporary domesticised places where the migrant workers socialise, rest, eat, groom, send packages, protest, dance and preach. At first glance, the FHDs’ occupation of public space may appear chaotically disordered, or an ‘ethnic spectacle’. Closer analysis reveals that this ritualised inhabitation has a unique ecology; it is a temporary but repeated socio-spatial system that produces a collective culture of solidarity, resistance and resourcefulness. Drawing upon ethnographic observations, interviews, photographs and spatial analysis, this paper explores the socio-political and cultural implications of this informal occupation. It demonstrates how FDHs are much more than docile subjects of domestic labour, rather, they are actors with agency, operating in an intermediate and mutable spatial zone, somewhere between the private and public sphere. The first time I documented Foreign Domestic Helpers (FDHs) in Hong Kong was in 2012. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was walking along the Central Elevated Walkway (CEW), a system of elevated walkways that connects over twenty-four buildings in the Central Business District (CBD). The CEW affords an alternative circulation to the urban density on the ground, as the elevated conduits weave in, out and between buildings on a suspended horizontal plane. The major destinations of the district can be conveniently experienced without setting foot on the ground. As I wandered into the former Central Market Arcade, most of the shops were closed, with shutters down. The arcade – with a closed row of shops on the right and a vacant gallery space on the left – served as a pedestrian corridor, and a steady stream of tourists and locals flowed through. My focus shifted from the closed retail spaces to the people sitting in front of them, on the floor. Groups of women were sitting on flattened cardboard boxes; eating, chatting and sleeping. They had small suitcases and bags placed within delineated spaces. Some groups had set up their cardboard boxes upright, or used opened umbrellas to form