Everyday Heritage, Spatio-temporal Dynamics and Place-making: Rethinking the Social Production of London’s Chinatown on the Backdrop of COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19-related racism on London’s Chinatown reveals the urgent need to reconceptualise this central London district beyond an essentialist idea of Chinatown. Research on London’s Chinatown as a lived and meaningful space often focuses only on self-identified Chinese people or their activities, which risks overlooking non-Chinese actors and the interactions between people and things in the social production of Chinatown. The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to demonstrate the cultural complexities of London’s Chinatown from a heritage perspective, challenging the dominant heritage discourses about the area. This study used an ethnographically oriented holistic qualitative research strategy and examined Chinatown in three interrelated dimensions: 1) Chinatown as a ‘lived everyday heritage space’, 2) Chinatown as a series of ‘spatio-temporal events’, and 3) Chinatown as a ‘process of negotiation’.

This thesis argues that the 1985 Chinatown designation can be seen as a top-down heritage/placemaking project, underpinning the ongoing construction of the dominant Chinatown heritage discourses by its influential stakeholders. These discourses portray it as a place of ‘celebration of (ethnic) difference’ associated with ‘community’ and ‘authenticity’. However, the ‘ethnic difference’ celebrated in these heritage discourses and practices is essentialised, commodified, and depoliticised, failing to adequately address structural inequalities. By contrast, in the process of bottom-up heritage-making, Londoners transform Chinatown into a site for negotiating various identity category boundaries shaped by their different positionalities and the intersection of multiple factors, through which they insert their voices about different layers of history and address their contemporary economic, social, and political needs. Furthermore, this thesis reveals the challenge faced by ESEA activists when using London’s Chinatown as a space for anti-racism work. The findings highlight the urgent need for researchers, heritage practitioners, activists and Chinatown stakeholders to problematise the ‘feel good’ Chinatown heritage discourses and acknowledge the multi-vocality of the place. If London’s Chinatown is to be adopted as a platform for anti-racist ESEA activism, it is crucial to challenge the normalised ethnicity-centred way of seeing the place, address intersectional inequalities, and foster intersectional resistances within the activism. This doctoral research also contributes to an anti-essentialist conceptualisation of Chinatown globally, and by extension, other urban spaces associated with transnational migrants in other settings.