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This week’s photos were taken from a hotel in downtown Atlanta by Greg Hickman. These are just some of the striking images in our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
In the middle of the 1980s, after lobbying from businesses and Chinese community leaders, a series of decorative gates were built to mark the various entrances to Montreal’s Chinatown. One of these is found at the corner of de la Gauchetière and Jeanne-Mance, the western end of the district. But to me, the real signal that I have entered Chinatown is when I pass beneath the Wing’s Nouilles Chinoises neon sign, one block east at Côté Street.
The Wing Building is the oldest surviving structure in Chinatown, built in 1826 and designed by James O’Donnell, who had moved to Montreal from New York to oversee the construction of a somewhat more illustrious project. Over the past 186 years, it has served as a military school, paper box factory and warehouse, according to Barry Lazar and Tamsin Douglas’ Guide to Ethnic Montreal. These days, the building is known for a distinctly eggy smell: this is the main supplier of fortune cookies to Chinese restaurants across eastern Canada.
The first time I came across Miss Villeray, she was looking a bit worse for the wear, holding fort above a neighbourhood bar that had seen better days. In 2008, the bar was sold to an ambitious entrepreneur who fixed it up without throwing away the original decor. It’s now a haunt for Villeray’s trendy thirtysomethings. Not my crowd, but I always appreciate the fact that Miss Villeray was restored to her former glory.
It used to be routine: wake up, walk to the wet market and buy the day’s fresh ingredients for dinner. Markets have always been a part of Hong Kong life, but these days, they are losing ground to supermarkets, whose numbers have grown exponentially over the past two decades.
Chain supermarkets Wellcome and Park’n’Shop now control more than 70 percent of the grocery sector, while the number of independent grocery stores and wet market stalls has declined by more than half since 1996. Tofu merchant Cheung Ching-loi says business at his stall in Tai Yuen Market declined by 60 percent over the past decade.
Other market vendors tell a similar story: fewer customers, quieter markets. In the government’s 102 public markets, one out of every seven stalls is vacant. The vacancy rate is similar in markets run by the Housing Authority and The Link Reit, a publicly-traded corporation that bought 96 markets from the government in 2005.
The situation became so bad at some markets they were simply shut down. Before it closed last year, the government-run Mong Kok Market was more than 60 percent empty. Vendors placed the blame not only on changing consumption habits, but on the market environment: wet, dirty, cluttered and poorly-ventilated.
That was certainly the case at Tai Yuen, which is located near the heart of the Tai Wo shopping district in the suburban town of Tai Po. Thirty years after its construction in 1980, half its stalls stood empty. Customers were so sparse that merchants took the afternoon as an opportunity to nap. There was no natural light, little ventilation and no air conditioning. The roof leaked when it rained.
Outside exit A9, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo
Oil Street. Photo by Eric To
This story was originally published in the November 2010 edition of Muse, the new-defunct review of Hong Kong arts and culture.
It was a hot night when I sat inside the cluttered studios of the pirate radio station FM 101, six floors up inside an industrial building in Kwun Tong. I was speaking to one of the station’s founders, a rock musician named Leung Wing-lai, when the doorbell rang. Leung excused himself to go open the door. Three people walked in, including Ah Kok Wong, a composer who has been working with Kwun Tong’s artists to lobby the government against a new policy that made it easier for the owners of industrial units to convert their space into offices or hotels.
Wong told me about an Arts Development Council survey that was meant to determine exactly how many artists, musicians and other creative people are making use of industrial space. Unfortunately, few artists received the survey, so Wong and several others had taken to distributing it themselves. “I have my own studio, a band room and a studio used by the radio station, and we didn’t get copies at any of these places,” he said. If not enough artists completed the survey, he told me, the government would have no clear picture of the thousands of creative people that work in low-rent, run-down industrial buildings, and its new industrial “revitalization” policy would lead to unchecked property speculation, pushing out a huge chunk of Hong Kong’s artists, musicians and cultural organizations.
Leung returned to his seat. We talked about FM 101, which focuses mainly on arts, culture and music and was set up to protest against regulations that make it nearly impossible for a non-profit, community-based radio station to get a broadcast licence. A recent crackdown on the station’s fundraising efforts has forced its volunteers to pay for its operating expenses out of their own pocket, which has only been possible because the studio’s rent is low. “Without this kind of space, where would we go?” he asked.
Subway, Budapest
Show off, Ezeres
These are just some of the striking images in our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
Hong Kong’s HK$5.5 billion new government headquarters is falling apart just three months after it opened
Crooked wall fixtures, chipped railings, torn wallpaper, stained walls and signboards held up by masking tape in the Legislative Council: the recent outbreak of legionnaire’s disease is not the only problem at the Hong Kong government’s expensive new headquarters.
Three months after lawmakers moved into the Legco complex, they are still confronted daily by a long list of flaws in the building. This came after the legionnaires’ disease bacteria was found in the water at the dining hall of the Legco building and many other locations in the government offices next door.
“The electric cables for a switch near to my office on the sixth floor have remained exposed since I moved in,” said Wong Kwok-lin, a Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker. “I never dare to touch it as I don’t know whether or not it’s getting electricity.”
Photos posted this week on Facebook highlight shoddy workmanship inside the complex, which is located on the site of the former Tamar naval base. In one photo, an alarm button and handicapped door-opening button are fixed to the wall at haphazard angles. In another, the sign for the Steward and Catering Services Office is attached to the wall with masking tape.
Lawmakers and visitors to the complex complain that stone walls are stained by paint and water, the wood railings inside lifts are heavily chipped, wallpaper is torn inside conference rooms, wall panels rattle when lift buttons are pressed and floors wobble and creak underfoot. Water fountains have been sheathed in plastic, possibly due to concerns about legionnaire’s disease.
Yesterday afternoon, the toilets’ salt water supply was abruptly suspended due to “emergency repair,” forcing building occupants to flush toilets with water from the sinks. No explanation was given.
“It almost seems as if it is a very worn-out building, but it’s not, it’s new,” said Civic Party councillor Audrey Eu Yuet-mee. “Once, one of the ceiling fixtures fell off when I was passing by. Luckily it didn’t fall on my head.”
My love affair with Bixi remains undiminished. This despite the wear-and-tear its popularity has caused — I have been left frustrated by broken docks and bikes on more than a couple of occasions — and the fact that accessibility on the fringes of its service areas is a bit spotty. (It’s no fun to bike home to Park Extension at 3am only to find out there’s no docking spots left at Parc metro, the only Bixi station in the entire neighbourhood.) I love the convenience of being able to cycle without worrying about a bike, the heft and stability of the big Bixi bikes, and even the name, which rolls off the tongue so easily and can be used as both a verb and a noun.
While Bixi has made cycling an even more assertive part of Montreal life, this was a bicycle city long before the first bike share stations opened in 2008. It’s one of the only places in North America where you see lots bikes used not only by students and cycling enthusiasts, but also by parents with children, deliverymen riding specialized three-wheel bikes and people hauling stuff around. I’ve put together a handful of photos, mostly taken last summer, of Montreal by bike. Take a look.
Dubai. Photo by Zeyad T. Al-Mudhaf
The Burj Khalifa defies the imagination. It stands nearly one kilometre above the streets of Dubai, spanning a total of 163 floors — 209 if you could the maintenance levels in the building’s spire. When it was completed in 2010, at a cost of more than US$1.5 billion, it was by far the world’s tallest building and almost certainly its most extravagant.
That extravagance was made all the more apparent by the economic turmoil that shook the world just before the Burj was set to open. Dubai was on the verge of bankruptcy, saved only by a US$10 billion bailout from the ruler of nearby Abu Dhabi, for whom the Burj was ultimately named. With most floors standing vacant and maintenance costs as dizzyingly high as the building itself — it takes a full four months just to clean the windows — the Burj revived long-standing questions about the sustainability of super-tall skyscrapers.
Those questions are especially relevant in Asia, where seven of the world’s ten tallest buildings can be found. Another 30 buildings taller than 300 metres — generally considered the limit between an ordinary high-rise and a “super-tall” — are now under construction in South Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and India.
“It’s an ego thing,” says co-founder of Singapore’s WOHA Architects, Richard Hassell. “I think a lot of the developers themselves have a ‘mine’s bigger and better than yours’ mentality. I think cheap energy was bad for architecture because people could basically make any kind of building comfortable, and that freed up the building to be anything they wanted it to be, so architecture’s become a bit lost in gratuitous form-making. The Dubai ‘look-at-me’ architecture. It’s a bit of a dead end.”
New Year’s Eve, Zenko-ji Temple, Nagano, Japan.
Photo by Peter Schön.
Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
Nobody really remembers how they first discovered Sense 99. Usually, they hear about it through a friend, who heard about it through a friend, who heard about it through a friend and so on. It is not quite a bar, not quite a private club, not an art gallery or a music venue, but it combines elements of all of these. To get there, you must make your way down Wellington Street, past the green-painted stalls of Hong Kong’s oldest street market, until you arrive in front of a worn metal door at the base of an old stone shophouse. Press the second doorbell from the top and a tinny voice will greet you through a speaker in the door.
“Wai?”
There is no secret password. Say pretty much anything and you will be greeted by a loud buzz. The door unlocks. Head up to the second floor, towards the sound of conversation and live music, until you enter a room that appears not to have been touched since the early colonial days of Hong Kong: green-and-white tile floors, wood windowframes, French doors opening onto a narrow balcony. There is a small bar on the right and a collection of stylishly mismatched furniture on the left. Upstairs, another balcony and a lounge where musicians bring their instruments and jam until the early hours of the morning.
This is not a typical Hong Kong bar.
The neighbourhood around Marconi Avenue is a bit of a strange place. I’m not even sure what to call it. Marooned between Little Italy to the east, the CPR tracks to the south, the Outremont railyards to the west and Jean-Talon to the north, it’s a kind of urban interstitial space, not entirely industrial, a little bit residential, without a name or any real defining features. Even the street names here are strange, changing unexpectedly and duplicating themselves for no reason, like at the corner of rue Alexandra and avenue Alexandra.
When I was back in Montreal last summer, I stayed with a friend in Park Extension, so I passed through this area almost every night on my way back home. It has become somewhat trendy in recent years. Dépanneur Le Pick-Up draws a mix of hipsters, taxi drivers and neighbourhood old-timers with its pulled-pork sandwiches and good coffee. Bands that once played further south have found a home at Il Motore on Jean-Talon. These are islands of activity in an archipelago of odd things: lonesome houses, unexpected churches, former factories.
When Norman Foster won the international competition for the master plan of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong last spring, I was disappointed. I thought it was plug-and-play urbanism, a crowd-pleasing design that had too much in common with so many interchangeable urban neighbourhoods that have sprung up in the past 20 years.
Of course, there’s another argument to be made. While Foster doesn’t take any big risks, he gets the fundamentals right. On paper, his plan for West Kowloon is environmentally-sensitive, pedestrian-friendly, small-scale and full of greenery. Given that it is more than a cultural district — it will be home to thousands of residents, 16,000 workers, hundreds of retail outlets, 18 cultural venues and countless visitors — it’s possible to see West Kowloon as Hong Kong’s most ambitious experiment in urban planning since the creation of the New Towns in the 1970s, which laid the groundwork for decades of large-scale modernist tower block development. The cultural district is a significant and positive departure from that model.
I wanted to hear more about the plan from the architects who worked on it, so last summer, I paid a visit to Colin Ward, the amiable lead architect on Foster’s West Kowloon team. We spoke in a conference room with a view over Victoria Harbour, barges and ferries streaming through its waters like ducks in a lake.
Ward began the interview with a warning. “Exemplar cultural districts can be, if you’re not careful, terrible urban districts,” he said. He stressed the importance of what the Foster team calls the “19th venue” — the public realm. “Culture should be embedded in the city — wrapped in the city,” he says. “Two thirds of this brief is ‘city,’ the filler that goes in between the cultural venues.”
The Bronx, New York. Photo by Chris Arnade
Chinatown, New York. Photo by Keith Goldstein
Chicago. Photo by Gabriel X. Michael
