Demystifying Chungking Mansions as Vertical ‘Little India’/‘Little South Asia’ Urban Enclave: Linguistic Landscape, Low-End Globalisation, and Hub of Superdiversity

Positioned as a node of low-end globalization, the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui represents a transnational urban space with many ethnic restaurants, grocery stores, shops and cheap hotels. As a vertical hub of superdiversity, the building features significant number of people from South Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal), Southeast Asia, Africa and beyond. Unlike most ethnic enclaves and multicultural areas that feature horizontal spatial organization, the Chungking Mansions conceptually represents a vertical ‘Little South Asia’ or ‘Little UN’ condensed into one building. The transient and anonymous Chungking Mansions is something of a ‘non-place’ but it also has a sense of community. The building over time gained a bad reputation as a mysterious, dodgy, shady and dangerous ethnic place where violence and crimes take place. This article aims to demystify the Chungking Mansions from under-explored sociolinguistic/multilingual perspectives. Languages and symbols inscribed in the linguistic/semiotic landscape, we argue, represent important anthropogenic impacts on geography and nature, which constitute salient entry points into understanding how migration, low-end globalization and superdiversity leave traces on the urban landscape. This study documents and shows how various multilingual signs and cultural and religious symbols enact ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious identities and produce and reproduce social meanings alongside the building’s verticality. These materially and symbolically contribute to a vertical geography of superdiversity.