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Most megaprojects focus on overcoming current infrastructure capacity problems or opening up new business opportunities, while a few may be inspired by iconic-symbolic or socio-political drivers. Also, many megaprojects may be seen to focus on benefitting proximate stakeholders in the short-medium term. A case is made here, for aligning the immediate expectations from a megaproject with a parallel focus on the best overall value for all, including long-term stakeholders, thereby also targeting more meaningful and sustainable contributions to the built environment. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper draws together and synergises relevant findings from two completed PhD projects and another research project in Hong Kong. Additionally, a focused literature survey and a case study, also contribute to the development of the proposed concepts and strategies. This is therefore a hybrid between a “review” paper and a “conceptual” paper where a suite of significant improvements to current practice are conceptualised and proposed, based on logical integration of relevant findings from the above three research projects, literature review and case study.

Inadequate stakeholder engagement has led to many process disruptions and adverse outcomes in recent megaprojects. A structured approach focusing throughout on common overall value from the outset is proposed to achieve better and more sustainable megaproject outcomes. Specific recommendations include: aligning megaproject stakeholder objectives with regional or even national needs and targeting co-creation of common value through early stakeholder involvement in planning and design of built infrastructure megaprojects.

The increasing number, scale and complexity of megaprojects has amplified their impact on the built environment and its sustainability, hence the imperative to incorporate sustainability considerations, so as to formulate and manage megaprojects better. The proposed approaches in this paper can help revamp megaproject strategies towards such sustainable outcomes.

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000.

This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong's films have been mush discussed in academia, but the gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women's roles in male's cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

This chapter examines how the breakthrough of Zhang Ziyi's depiction of a female kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013) transforms the figure of the heroine in Chinese action films. Zhang is well known for her acting in action films conducted by renowned directors, such as Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai. After winning 12 different Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Gong Ruomei in The Grandmaster, Zhang announced that she would no longer perform in any action films to show her highest respect for the superlative character Gong. Tracing Zhang's transformational portrait of a heroine in The Grandmaster alongside her other action roles, this analysis demonstrates how her performance projects the directors' distinctive gender viewpoints. I argue that Zhang's characterisation of Gong remodels heroine-hood in Chinese action films. Inheriting the typical plot of a daughter's use of martial arts for revenge for her father's death, Gong breaks from conventional Chinese action films that highlight romantic love during a woman's adventure and the decisive final battle scene. Beyond the propensity for sensory stimulation, Gong's characterisation enables Zhang to determine that women can really act in action films – demonstrating their inner power and ability to create multi-layered characters – not merely relying upon physical action. This chapter offers a relational perspective of how women transform the action film genre not merely as gender spectacles but as embodied figures that represent emerging female subjectivity.

In this, the exciting first volume of a three-volume edited collection, you will be taken on a gender-focused adventure through action cinema's formative years. Through a series of in-depth case studies and analysis, each chapter focuses on the way that gender has been discussed in such films as the Mad Max franchise, sword and sorcery films, and the Angel trilogy. There are character case studies, including Ellen Ripley in Aliens, Sharon Stone in her ground-breaking work as femme fatale, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves. We also take you on a journey through the action cinema of Wong Kar-Wai and Action Women in Colombian national cinema. The collection even takes you into the gendered dinosaur world of Jurassic Park. Whilst Action Cinema has often been derided, it has also been celebrated. We hope that this edited collection will make you want to revisit the action movies of the past, whilst we open them up to brand new interrogations.

The twofold aim of this theory-building article is to raise questions about the ability of queer cinema to transform market culture and ideologies around gender and sexuality. First, the authors examine how the very capitalization of queer signifiers may compromise the dominant order from within. Second, the authors address how brands possibly can draw on these signifiers to project authenticity.

Through visual methods of film criticism and the semiotic analysis of three films (Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire), the authors outline some profound narrative tensions addressed by movie makers seeking to give an authentic voice to queer lives.

Brands can tap into these narrative attempts at “seeing the invisible” to signify authenticity. False sublation, i.e. the “catch-22” of commodifying the queer imaginaries one seeks to represent, follows from a Marcusean analysis.

In more practical terms, “seeing the invisible” is proposed as a cultural branding technique. To be felicitous, one has to circumvent three narrative traditions: pathologization, rationalization and trivialization.

In contrast to Marcuse's pessimist view emphasizing its affirmative aspects, the authors conclude that such commodification in the long term may have transformative effects on the dominant ideology. This is because even if something is banished to the realm of imagination, e.g. through aesthetic semblance, it can still be enacted in real life.

The goal of this article is to examine the current trends of political cinema in postcolonial Hong Kong. Many leaders of the Hong Kong mainstream cinema have accepted the Chinese authoritarian rule as a precondition for expanding into the ever-expanding Mainland film market, but a handful of conscientious filmmakers choose to make political cinema under the shadow of a wealthy and descendant industry, expressing their desire for democracy and justice and critiquing the unequal power relations between Hong Kong and China.

This paper consults relevant documentary materials and cinematic texts to contextualize the latest development of political cinema in Hong Kong. It presents an in-depth analysis of the works of two local independent filmmakers Herman Yau and Vincent Chui.

This study reveals a glimpse of hope in the current films of Herman Yau and Vincent Chui, which suggests that a reconfiguration of local identity and communal relationship may turn around the collective despair caused by the oppressive measures of the Chinese authoritarian state and the end of the Umbrella Movement in late 2014.

Despite the small sample size, this paper highlights the rise of cinematic localism through a closer look at the works of Hong Kong independent filmmakers.

This study reveals an ambivalent mentality in the Hong Kong film industry where critical filmmakers strive to assert their creativity and agency against the externally imposed Chinese hegemonic power.

This investigation is an original scholarly study of film and politics in postcolonial Hong Kong.