Even the most ordinary street in Lisbon is a mosaic. The stones may be simply-hewn blocks of some kind of gray rock, or elaborate black and white designs, as found in the praças. Obviously putting them in place and maintaining them is labour-intensive, but they have the advantage of providing an easily-repaired surface that also allows rain water to percolate into the ground.
If there’s a city that proves the lengths to which a government is willing to go for cars, it’s Hong Kong. Fewer than one in five people here actually own a car; most of the traffic is made up of trucks or some form of public transportation. It’s one of the less congested cities in Asia. Yet the government insists on building new roads at the expense of the city’s environment and quality of life.
The Central Kowloon Route is one of the most recent examples. Current plans call for an expressway to be tunnelled across the Kowloon peninsula, from a highway near the old Kai Tak Airport in the east to the West Kowloon expressway in the west. This in and of itself could be a good thing, since it has the potential to remove cross-town truck and bus traffic from noisy and polluted surface streets. But instead of using the new tunnel as a way to reduce the impact of traffic on surface roads, the government is increasing it. Along with the construction of the tunnel, the Central Kowloon Route will involve the widening of the existing Gascoigne Road flyover that runs through one of the city’s most densely-populated neighbourhoods.
The widening of the flyover is pretty much a done deal, unfortunately, so the question now is how to mitigate its impact. Sound barriers have recently come into vogue here, but they often create visual pollution every bit as nasty as noise, and of course they don’t do anything for the more serious problem of air pollution. To deal with this dilemma, an architectural competition was held for the design of the sound barriers along the rebuilt Gascoigne Road flyover, and the winners, a team of four recent architecture school graduates, found a solution that is both obvious and ingenious: cover the road in greenery. The flyover would be enclosed in a double-layered shell of glass modules that could support vegetation, which would then grow up and over the surface of the shell. The architects pointed to wall trees as their inspiration.
Engineers still need to determine if the winning proposal is technically feasible. If it is, and the government chooses to integrate it into the final design of the widened flyover, it could be a way to deal with the future highways that the government insists on building and the people are mostly powerless to stop.
Sam Javanrouh, the Toronto photographer who often collaborates with Spacing, has a talent for riding a bike without hands, which he often uses to take photos for his blog, Daily Dose of Imagery. This time, he’s gone one step further and made a video. Forget for a moment that riding without hands on a city street is dangerous; this video captures, more than anything else I’ve seen, the real sense of freedom that set bicycles apart from other modes of transportation. Javanrouh speeds past cars, pedestrians and streetcars with the help of nothing but two wheels and his own energy. In Montreal, I could bike downtown from my apartment in about 10 minutes, about the same time as a taxi, 5 minutes faster that the bus and one-quarter the time of walking. It was like having the speed of a car without any of the additional baggage.
Hong Kong is a city with very utilitarian streetscapes — everything on the street, from paving to furniture, is standardized, cost-efficient and bland — so visiting Taipei was a bit of a relief. Streets there are far more haphazard and eclectic. Part of that has to do with the wide range of street furniture (like the bollards I wrote about last winter) but part of it simply comes from nice decorative touches, like these mosaic walls along Yongkang Street. They add a bit of individuality and character to the street, avoiding (at least in this part of Taipei) the repetitiveness so common here in HK.
Urbanphoto is pleased to welcome our newest contributor, Sam Massie, who is en route to Kunming, Yunnan, where he is starting a new job with a Chinese NGO. He will blog about urban spaces in southwestern China.
Ever wonder where chandeliers come from? The answer is usually Guzhen, a city in China’s Guangdong province that produces 60% of the world’s light fixtures. It isn’t just one or two factories; the entire city is devoted to the sale and production of lights. Riding a taxi through Guzhen, I passed block after block of eight-story buildings, the storefronts of which glittered with the light of thousand of lamps and chandeliers. As we pulled onto the highway, my cab driver remarked lazily: “This area was farmland three years ago.” I him whether he preferred living in the old countryside or the new city. He replied that he preferred living in the countryside because the air was less polluted, and because it was quieter.
The cab driver could have been talking about any town in the Pearl River Delta. This region, which includes the cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, contains hundreds of specialized factory towns that churn out manufactured goods for export to every continent. Rapid growth in exports has in turn led to similarly rapid urbanization. But “urban growth” or “sprawl” don’t even begin to describe the scale of the change underway — it’s as though the entire Pearl River region is going from countryside to big-city overnight.
For the whole duration of the three-hour cab ride, I saw waves of pink-tile houses erupting from rice paddies, the concrete posts of unfinished highway overpasses looming overhead, and forests of 30-story high-rises sprouting near every intersection. This phenomenon is best described as in-situ urbanization: it occurs without center or direction, with no visible line between city and countryside, and no urban center driving outward expansion. Every village is sprouting high rises.
