Centro de estudos sobre a Mudança
Socioeconómica e o Território

How did the masses of workers who built the great infrastructures and public buildings in Macau during the Portuguese rule impact their conception and construction? How were the long-distance relations between central institutions based in Portugal (e.g. the Colonial Urbanisation Office) and the colonial public works (CPW) in Macau, particularly crossing the 20th century, is still scarce and little is known about its labour management and operations. How and to what extent was it different from other former colonial territories? The discipline of architecture, when approaching the PW associated with colonialism and territorial occupation in Macau, has so far focused mainly on technicians and the constitution of design teams. Even studies about the technical and conceptual knowledge transfers between experts from Macau, Portugal, Hong Kong and China remain scarce. This focus on the design elite does not consider the input of workers who built infrastructure and public facilities. As such, critical questions about the labour involved in the spatialisation of the architectural plans are still missing: who were these workers? Did they come from mainland China? How were they recruited? How were they paid? What skills did they bring? What training did they receive? What repercussions did these work experiences have? What conflicts did they provoke? Did they resist? Did they collaborate? In response, the LabourMap-Macao will evaluate the role(s) and impact of mass labour to shed light on (still) invisible workers. It will survey master plans, architectural projects, construction sites, and labour movements to offer more complex narratives on the relationship between the history of China and Portuguese colonisation through PW construction. The project aims for a broader intersection of agents and geographies and to open a new line of research intersecting architectural, labour, and construction history studies. It will cross two colonial powers – the Portuguese and the British – with two different colonial settings – Macau and Hong Kong. Exploring their interconnection from the perspective of labour will result in two ways: on the one hand, overlooked construction processes and actors will be surveyed; on the other, Macau will be pulled away from its ghetto-position within the Portuguese colonial studies.