Place-based knowledge, which is rooted in informal spaces and their users’ experiences, is essential for co-envisioning planning alternatives and translating them into action beyond formal planning systems. This paper examines the Saving Pang Jai Campaign, a self-mobilised, community-led initiative in mid-2010s Hong Kong that sought to preserve and reimagine the Yen Chow Street Temporary Hawker Bazaar (Pang Jai), a 44-year-old fabric market facing demolition for public housing. The case turns on two competing ways of knowing the same place. To the government, Pang Jai was a public space temporarily designated for a hawker bazaar, subject to the state’s overriding right to resume the land for redevelopment without acknowledging the place-based values; to its hawkers, users and the wider community, Pang Jai was a lived ‘community commons’ where decades of hawking had built social capital and linked fabric industries to the neighbourhood. Through participatory workshops, advocacy and hawkers’ attempts, hawkers — many unlicensed and excluded from formal decision-making — empowered themselves with the community to co-develop an alternative vision for the bazaar as a commons, which also became an ‘intellectual commons’ within the hawker community and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Drawing on interviews in 2019 and 2025 and ongoing observations, this paper argues that community-led planning enabled hawkers to assert their rights through place-based knowledge and to shape community-apsired planning futures beyond government-defined planning frameworks and decisions. Although the market was forcibly relocated in January 2023 and some elements of the community plan ‘tactically’ executed by the government, Pang Jai’s planning process shows how international cases can reshape what counts as legitimate planning knowledge — offering UK and Irish community-led planning an insurgent counterpart to statutory models and a way of seeing the ‘informal’ and ‘temporary’ spaces as a valuable resource that planners may overlook.