Cute Puppy

Don’t think I’m above posting photos of cute puppies I see on the street.

Urban Exclaves

Kowloon Walled City

Fagstein has really upped the ante on his Montreal Geography Trivia. For the latest installment (the sixty-fifth!), he posted a map of the Montreal suburb of Côte St. Luc and asked why it has two exclaves, which pretty much stumped everyone, even those who knew about the exclaves. With the help of the Gazette’s archives, which were recently made available on Google News, he was able to chart the political wheeling-and-dealing that led to the two stray bits of CSL.

What might be more interesting than how they came into being is what kind of an impact they’ve had on the city. One of the exclaves encompasses a portion of Macdonald Avenue, right on the border of Montreal and Hampstead. I’d always wondered why Macdonald was lined by big apartment blocks while the streets around it were much lower-density. Now, thanks to Fagstein, I know it’s because CSL saw the exclave as an opportunity to reap the profits from high-density development without making a single one of its suburban citizens upset, because the only people who would object to a bunch of apartment towers sprouting in their backyard lived in Hampstead and Montreal.

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Bushwick Trailer Park

Having successively appropriated so much Middle American iconography — from trucker hats to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer — some north Brooklyn hipsters may have decided that their living space ought to reach the same heights of irony as their wardrobes. Enter the Nut Factory (video below), an exclusive trailer park for artists currently situated inside a warehouse in Bushwick, east of Williamsburg.

Like homesteaders following the route of the transcontinental railroad, hipsters began gentrifying parts of Bushwick along the L train when — depending on whom you ask — they were priced out of Williamsburg or began to find it too mainstream for their liking. So while the “frontier” of their settlement has technically pushed out as far as Ridgewood, in Queens, it’s concentrated mainly along the narrow corridor easily reached by the L, and vast swathes of industrial Bushwick still invite experiments in cheap housing.

Among them, the urban trailer park may be uniquely qualified to come of age.

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The Old Mid-Levels

Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels has always been a wealthy place, home first to the city’s Western elite and then to a broader mix of local and expatriate professionals. Its narrow, hilly streets were once lined by mansions, rowhouses and lowrise apartment blocks, but that has gradually given way to a kind of vertical suburbia where giant apartment towers sit atop parking garage podiums that face the street with blank walls and driveways.

These hostile, extravagant constructions make the Mid-Levels an unpleasant place to walk around, despite the overall quietude and the abundance of greenery. But there are still a handful of streets that retain a pleasant human scale. These are streets where pedestrians are greeted by big windows, balconies, rough-cut stone walls and small shops, not over-the-top fountains, hotel-style lobbies and massive driveways.

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Co-opting the Commercial Street

It’s hard to describe the sound of Sai Yeung Choi Street on a typical evening. It’s the echo of horns and sirens through the Mongkok canyons, the cacophony of video billboards and shop stereos. It’s the sound of sixteen thousand shoppers flocking each hour to the most crassly commercial of Hong Kong streets.

But there’s more to it than just shopping. Sai Yeung Choi Street is also the “West Dog-Dragon Cultural District,” a feisty theatre group’s response to government-led cultural initiatives like West Kowloon. (In Cantonese, dog and nine are homonyms, so Dog-Dragon and Kowloon are pronounced the same way.) Since 2003, FM Theatre Power (FTMP) has used the street as the base for its off-kilter performances, turning a shrine to consumerism into a haven for art.

“We want to engage Hong Kong people in the street, to break the barrier between them and performers,” says Banky Yeung, FMTP’s enigmatic creative director. “They’re not used to seeing street performances – they think it’s for beggars. They think that streets are only for walking or shopping. That attitude goes up into the government. We want to challenge these negative perceptions.”

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Shenzhen’s Future: Special Political Zone?

The police have taken over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. They are rehearsing for an official event to happen later in the day and many of the biennale’s outdoor installations at Shenzhen’s massive Civic Square have been temporarily closed off to the public for the occasion.

Ou Ning, the biennale’s curator, is standing in the square watching thousands of police officers and soldiers march in.

“I’ve been taking photos of the police standing in front of the exhibits,” says Ou, dressed in black, standing unassumingly on the side of the square. “It’s quite funny to see.”

Ou lived in Shenzhen for a decade before moving to Guangzhou and eventually Beijing. More than any other Chinese city, he says, people in Shenzhen are eager for political reform. He sees the next step in Shenzhen’s evolution as becoming a political testing ground for the rest of China and he wants this year’s biennale to heighten awareness of Shenzhen’s political role through the use of public space.

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“I Love to be Brainwashed”

It’s been four years since the Finnish (those notorious malcontents) packaged their woes and miseries into a funny, ironic performance and called it the Helsinki Complaints Choir. Since then, people from Birmingham to Chicago have gotten into the act, but the concept only seems to have reached Asia in the past year. Tokyo pulled out all the stops in a spectacular performance. Hong Kong’s first Complaints Choir was formed last spring and it started performing over the summer.

While the lyrics of many other cities dwell on the mundane (bad bosses, annoying neighbours, the weather), Hongkongers have that Cantonese knack for complaining in a very big way, and it shows through in the Complaints Choir. Some of the big-ticket complaints include the demolition of the Star Ferry pier, the government’s inept planning of the West Kowloon Cultural District, overpriced real estate, the minibonds scandal, substandard public education, declining wages, the lack of universal suffrage, Cantopop, political gaffes, the Chinese melamine scandal, the TVs that blare incessantly on public buses, a sensationalistic and uncritical news media and just generally being a city of ju pah (butterface) girls and awkward guys.

Whew. They even manage to squeeze a sardonic Mandarin jab at the Chinese “Motherland” into the chorus. At least Hong Kong is better off than Singapore, which banned its Complaints Choir from performing in public.

Sunday Shopping

Sunday shopping in Myeongdong, Seoul’s most popular retail district.

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Empty L.A.

The density of urban slums once drove city planners and social workers mad — and, in some cases, still does today. But perhaps because of the vicious crime that followed mass abandonment of cities like Detroit, or the specter, for the first time, of an entire city’s virtual erasure in the wake of Hiroshima, the empty, depopulated city has inspired more horror in the last sixty years.

In the original (1953) film version of The War of the Worlds, Los Angeles is almost completely evacuated to await its doom. The philosophical 2001 film Vanilla Sky opens with a nightmare sequence in which the main character wakes up to an empty Manhattan. Alan Weisman’s recent book The World Without Us detailed precisely what would happen to the built environment over time if people really did disappear from cities.

Limited disappearance has even been used as a tool to stress the catastrophic consequences of a particular category of person vanishing, as in the 1922 Austrian novel and subsequent film The City Without Jews (a shocking anticipation of Nazi anti-Semitism), or the 2004 film A Day Without a Mexican.

These apocalyptic precedents are what first came to mind upon first encountering photographer Matthew Logue’s new collection, Empty L.A.

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Politics and Pedestrians

On New Year’s Eve, 9pm, Tsim Sha Tsui was packed with revellers. Everyone seemed to be having a good time; even the South Asian touts who are normally aggressive in their pitches for fake watches, tailored suits and Indian restaurants were taking it easy and hanging out in the middle of Nathan Road. Hundreds of thousands of people filled streets normally choked with traffic, including — judging by the amount of Mandarin being spoken — many tourists from mainland China. So what better time for pro-democracy activists to get their message across?

After all, it’s been an eventful season for politics in this part of the world. It started with a plan by politicians from two of Hong Kong’s opposition parties to resign en masse in January, forcing by-elections that would serve as de facto referendums on democracy. What’s at stake are constitutional reforms slated for 2012. That’s supposed to be the year that Hong Kong gains universal sufferage, putting an end to the current corporatist system, whereby half the legislature is elected by the people and the other half is elected by members of “functional constituencies” that represent various professions and industries. But China’s National People’s Congress has decided to indefinitely postpone Hong Kong’s date with full democracy. The mass resignations would be a litmus test to see just how badly Hongkongers want a say in how they are governed.

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