Abstract
Borders are indispensable to capital's formatting of the world. As social institutions, borders not only mediate relations of capital and state but also establish boundaries, limits, interfaces and zones that register the profound transformations effected by capital's operations across and beyond existing territorial demarcations. The town of Tseung Kwan O in the New Territories of the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region (SAR) is a site that bundles and multiplies these changes and variations. This restless spatial reorganization is most evident in the borders that separate its data centre cluster, waste dump and the nearby LOHAS Park real estate development. Tseung Kwan O hosts one of the largest commercial data centre clusters in the world. Located on reclaimed land close to undersea cable landings and linked to digital infrastructures that support financial trading on the opposite shores of Hong Kong Island, the site is a crucial gateway and switch-point between the mainland Chinese and global data environments. Tseung Kwan O is also the site of one of Hong Kong's main waste dumps, the South East New Territories (SENT) Landfill. Close to capacity and under pressure from population density and land prices, the dump abuts the data centre cluster in the Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate. This complex of spatial and infrastructural relations creates a series of borders that both crisscross the area and extend beyond it. To conceive of Tseung Kwan O as a borderland is to probe divisions between East and West, liberalism and state capitalism, data and waste.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Data Farms, Circuits, Labour, Territory |
| Editors | Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Open Humanities Press |
| Pages | 096-105 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781785421266 |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |