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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how homeless women inhabit Hong Kong’s pedestrian tunnels as sites of material and affective entanglement. Through acts of ‘making home’ amid state cleansing, their subterranean domesticities reveal how care, matter, and resistance interweave underground.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages with the panel’s call to rethink the urban from below by examining how gendered forms of marginality, matter, and care intersect in Hong Kong’s subterranean spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research with women living in a pedestrian tunnel, it traces how everyday practices of ‘making home’ materialise through acts of hoarding, repair, and cohabitation with objects.

Their ‘underground’ existence is continually shaped by municipal regimes of cleansing that seek to erase habitation under the guise of hygiene and order. Yet the women’s material improvisations transform these tunnels into precarious but affectively charged domestic worlds. The accumulation of objects, often dismissed as waste, emerges as a ‘technology of the self,’ anchoring moral worth and agency within an environment of exclusion. By foregrounding the entanglement of humans, materials, and infrastructures, the paper situates the pedestrian tunnel as more than a space of deprivation, it is a generative terrain where matter, care, and resistance converge. Through these subterranean domesticities, the city’s margins are revealed not as voids but as dense and vital sites of urban becoming.