On Sundays, Hong Kong’s financial district transforms into ‘Little Manila’. Taken over by hundreds (if not hundreds of thousands) of Filipina domestic workers on their day off, the austere district’s public spaces are turned domestic by the prescience of the women inhabiting an otherwise inhospitable context. Such negotiations between an imposed image of the City—a burgeoning spectacle of ceaseless progress—and the everyday spatial practices of the city delineate how people move through, are defined by and in turn define their urban contexts. Urban design and planning, and its godly, top-down perspectives, often reduce complexity in favour of legibility and—obligated by the need for rapid development and resultant unequal resource allocation—homogeneity. Exhumed from the responsibility to reflect a certain cultural or social identity, cities become formulaic effigies to ‘development’. However, acts of collective reimagining of the current built environment—packed into the crevices of institutional planning—continue producing pluralities. It is perhaps in this very spirit that the projects at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 invoke the notion of collective intelligence—morphing curator Carlo Ratti’s overall Intelligens to redefine architecture, and its reliance, its insistence on the ‘virtues’ of technology as a means for collectivism.

Another way of reading the city—one that is set against strict rationalism that upholds development at all costs, measured in kilometres of highway and heights of skyscrapers (or statues)—must then focus on the lived realities of an urban population, considering how the production of space, a process determined by social practices and power dynamics, is simultaneously defined and subverted by collective experience. This thread of an alternative urban discourse, juxtaposing rationalism with the situated lived realities and collective memories of a city, could be drawn through the exhibitions curated for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao as collateral projects at the Biennale this year. All three stress on a dual image of the city, one that is planned and the other which is lived in. Instead of leaning into promises of progress reliant on the projective role assumed by architectural representations, the displays by the participants reflect on the everyday infrastructures and spatial praxes that make up the city, considering what it means to produce/re-produce architecture in a world marked by flux.

Producing the City

For their exhibition, Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive, curators Fai Au, Ying Zhou and Sunnie S.Y. Lau bring together detailed research comprising architectural drawings and models that spotlight the “ordinary architectures that have been fundamental to Hong Kong’s global aspirations”. The research sheds light on the role of post-colonial development—from co-operative housing and multifunctional market-library-sports public buildings to the composite and modernist industrial buildings—in shaping Hong Kong in the years in which it became a democracy. These buildings, unlike the surveilled, gatekept glass boxes of the new Hong Kong, are the city’s sole ‘future heritages’, the curators insist, marking the determination of a past defined by scarcity and political conflict. Many are currently marked for redevelopment or have been shuttered already.

If Hong Kong’s display tries to underwrite the image of an instant city produced by capitalist desire by presenting an archive of public infrastructure that more accurately responds to its socioeconomic conditions, Taiwan’s collateral project takes a more ambiguous stance on its relationship with modernity. Focused on the intrinsic role the emergence of the semiconductor industry in the country played in influencing the overall organisation of the Taiwanese urban realm, it balances the desire for ‘efficiency’ with traditional belief systems; the “conflicts and coordination between daily perception and social control”. The incessant transformation of Taiwan into a tech hub is a process that is familiar to many ‘developing’ countries. As Keller Easterling elucidates in the book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014), the establishment of free trade zones and the IT industry in the knowledge-based economy has come to greatly influence the composition of cities and what she calls ‘infrastructure space’ —mostly mundane, repeatable spaces such as car parks and hotels, cash machines, suburbs, business parks, satellite communications and electronic devices. For Easterling, urbanism today is determined by the information layer of a city, which governs how people and buildings are organised. Layering onto this force that insists on repeatability in urban form, the proposals presented in NON-Belief showcase particular responses to the island-nation’s precarity—natural, economic and political.

Instead of a reflective look at heritage, or what that heritage could mean in the future, the displayed projects in NON-Belief, including architectural models and installations, propose a new imagination for posterity. There’s a very interesting interplay in both showcases, between the past (and the conditions that shaped it) and an inevitable future (marked by uncertainty). If the past and the future are states of negotiation in Hong Kong and Taiwan’s projects, in Macao’s display at Venice, Parallel Worlds, this state is most pronounced. Harping on the fractured understandings of the City and the city engendered by a rapid process of urbanisation and unstated gentrification, displacement and demolition, the display centres on architectural photographer Iwan Baan’s documentation of the city, juxtaposing two very different worlds. On the one hand, Macao is the ‘Las Vegas of the East’, and on the other, for many of its residents, it is an old, sixteenth-century trading port—almost completely preserved. Questioning what the real version of the city is, and how it’s to be understood by its residents and the world at large—especially given a platform such as the Venice Architecture Biennale—the city is presented as a fractured simulacrum of reality, at once modern and historic, developed and deteriorating, here and not.

Presenting the city

The existence of several temporalities within an overall urban cosmology recalls Aldo Rossi’s insistence that the form of a city can only be understood by placing it within a larger history, by studying urban artefacts and their evolution in different eras. For Rossi, urban artefacts, “characterised by their own history and thus by their own form”, represent the original functions of a city, its true characteristics determined through “the threefold relationship of site, event and sign”. In this sense, we could also think of the architectural production and documentation in the three exhibitions at the Biennale as artefacts in themselves. Layering social interactions, associations and the implicit influence of global infrastructure through their reproductions, each presents a perspective on the city that is distinct, contextual and vitally symbolic as “the locus of collective memory”.

Unlike conventional modes of architectural representations—widely misattributed to be neutral—the models, drawings and ephemera are not concerned with a condition of stasis, but are very much in flux, much like the cities they depict. This new understanding of an artefact thus offers us a chance to examine the forces that shape the ‘global city’ today—that is, digital infrastructure (implicitly controlling who gets access to what space), physical amenities and structures (explicitly controlled by the flow of capital) and the people who shuttle between these. To resort to Michel de Certeau, who writes in Practice of Everyday Life (1980), “Stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighbourhoods, families or individuals, while the rumours propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figure of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure.”

In one of the mega drawings that is part of Hong Kong’s display, the Kiu Kwan Mansion is reproduced in plan, sections and elevations. Apart from detailing a history that situates it within the urban cosmology of Hong Kong, the drawing also records the date, time and materials with which, in 1967 at the height of anti-government riots in the city, resistance groups inhabited the building. A composite building—a typology particular to the urban region—the structure accommodated residential as well as commercial functions, but at the same time was most recognisably a headquarters for pro-communist factions. A similar case study, the Man King Building, also details seditious activities of protesting groups in 2003, while underscoring how the mixed-use building was the result of zoning and building regulation byelaws of the 70s; now upended by the aspirations of our globalised urban lifestyles. For Rem Koolhaas, it is precisely these conditions that lead to the generic city, a placeless place, that, while nondescript in identity, is saturated with political power, since the processes that inform its inception are inherently political (as French philosopher Henri Lefebvre also argues in his seminal The Production of Space).

The manipulation of capital towards frenetic architectural visions is most markedly evident in Macao’s display, which, apart from Baan’s photographs, includes a large-scale installation depicting the skyline of the city; burgeoning skyscrapers to one side and the ‘undistinguished’ old town to the other includes not only projects that already stand, but interventions by students taking part in the Biennale, collapsing distinctions of past, present and future in the re-produced representations. The curators note that for them, four versions of Macao are intelligible at once: the old town, casino city, new city and digital city. While Old Town has become a facsimile of itself, preserved until it falls prey to future redevelopment, most know Macao as the larger-than-human (in scale and lifestyle) built environments—the pastiche of an ill-fitting Western present and Disneyfied past. Baan’s photographs underscore this dissonance, at once mundane and surreal, artifice and authentic.

Re-producing urban re-presentations

In bringing to light aspects of a city that are often overlooked, the projects also underscore what is often missed in the mythic perceptions of urban development. Particularly striking in this regard are installations in Taiwan’s showcase. For instance, Climate Justice maps real-time climate data for the island nation, leading visitors to consider how the industrialisation of the landscape has inadvertently shaped its present cities. Similarly, the understanding of digital networks in determining the form of the city in Taiwan is notable. The votive lamp at one end of the gallery space in Taiwan’s display juxtaposes traditional religious symbols with modern technological elements—circuit boards, chips and wires lighting up the displayed deities—to signal a shift to a future mediated by technology. Similarly, several proposals touch upon how Taiwan might make use of digital spatial control and manipulate it for particular contexts in the country. The models deliberately complicate the notion of a certain future by placing it against the uncertainties of the present.

On the other hand, Hong Kong employs the rhetoric of architectural drawings, situating the drawings in particular contexts through very specific annotations. In this, they present an archive in which culture is embedded in the unsung infrastructure, which first projected the image of a post-colonial city, poised for development. The question of culture and its depiction is similarly unclear for Macao; whether to submit to the illusions of the megacity, or hold on to a now commercialised past. All three crucially posit this question: Is it still possible for cities to maintain distinct cultural characteristics in the age of globalised infrastructure? And what would these cultural characteristics be to begin with?

An alternative architectural production, a post-production if you will, which doesn’t rely on possibility, but on the present, makes a contentious artefact of the exhibition itself. It examines how inhabitation has continued to deal with the limitations of infrastructure. Instead of relying on strategies for defining space, the exhibitions spotlight tactics by which communities navigate spatial conditions. If, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida argues, archives don’t just preserve events, but also shape them, the three exhibitions’ emphasis on lived experiences contaminates an otherwise mute register. In revealing the dichotomies and questioning what third way there might be, it opens up spaces of possibility. How are we to look at (and understand) the forces that make up the built environment? Where do these distinctions lie? The conflict between the City and the city, then, does not lie in questions of sustainability or efficiency, but might, in fact, lie in flux, limbo and the communities that negotiate them; and most importantly, in how these stories are represented.