Deep in Hong Kong’s core, 17 floors of a run-down building full of transients provide a key to understanding globalization from the bottom up. Gordon Mathews’s Ghetto at the Center of the World (Univer­sity of Chicago Press, 2011) paints a detailed portrait of life in and around Chungking Mansions, a single property with two common retail/galleria floors with a basement, and three independent towers that rise above them. The building is full of cheap guest houses, retail space devoted to electronics, and—one can euphemistically say—informal transactions. The book takes a penetrating look at the building’s residents, businesses, and interconnected international flows of people and commerce—all of which have generated strong interest in academic and business circles as globalization creates a growing need to understand such organic structures, which can provide a framework for modeling a new urban paradigm.

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