Walking As Infrastructural Practice: Provisioning In Sampson Wong's "When In Doubt"

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2023

Published In

Future Anterior: Journal Of Historic Preservation History, Theory, And Criticism

Abstract

The article considers heritage through the walking practice of the Hong Kong artist and urbanist Sampson Wong. Wong's YouTube video channel "When in doubt, take a walk" (2020–2023) appeared shortly after political contestation in 2019 and the global COVID pandemic transformed the landscape of the city. This period effectively cut Hong Kong off from the world, but also from the possibility of memorializing the affectively charged traumas of protests that marked sites throughout the territory. Wong's video walks become participatory meanders that refamiliarize a city that had been closed to gathering and recollection. The article considers earlier theorizations of walking and the city and argues that "When in Doubt" can best be understood as both an infrastructural practice and a practice of infrastructure. This analysis brings together infrastructure's role as both a material and social mediation. The author draws on Lauren Berlant's work to consider how "When in Doubt" negotiates both the difficulty of holding on to attachments to the city and the notion of an easily shared, agreed-upon common. This reading extends understandings of heritage toward the productive ambivalences and loss that are central to the carrying through of the past into the present.

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