Archive for the Environment category
December 28th, 2009
Container gardening is the ultimate form of urban greening: space-efficient, low-maintenance and productive. People in Hong Kong have been doing it for generations.
Last summer, on a sunny but oppressively hot day, I found myself on the roof of a 1960s-era highrise apartment building in Kwun Tong. Among the lines of billowing laundry were several clusters of potted plants maintained by the building’s residents. Though most were decorative plants, there were some fruits being grown, including kumquats and tomatoes. Anyone interested in growing their own herbs or vegetables could have easily done so.
Unfortunately, informal rooftop gardens like this are set to become a rarity. The Kwun Tong building on which these photos were taken will be demolished next year for a massive redevelopment project. Newer buildings tend to have smaller roof areas and no room for plants. My building has just two flats per floor, for example, which makes for a very small roof, most of which taken up by stairwell entrances and an elevator machine room. Even if I tried to start a container garden up there, it’d probably be cleared away by the building management.
The government is pushing developers to include green features in new developments. The public housing authority, whose buildings house more than a third of Hong Kong’s population, is experimenting with green roofs, vertical greening and community gardens. But there’s something to be said for giving people a bit of empty space and letting them do what they want with it.
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Popularity: 9% [?]
December 23rd, 2009
Air conditioning is a bit like a narcotic: once it claws its way into your life, you begin changing yourself to accommodate its demands. When air conditioning became common in Hong Kong, it changed the very fabric of the city, shrinking windows, destroying verandahs, turning streets into dripping, humming corridors meant to serve the useful space, which moved indoors.
In the past, Hong Kong architecture emphasized shade and ventilation, with arcaded sidewalks and large windows. The new architecture of A/C turned its back on these traditional ways of coping with a hot climate, eventually creating a city that struggles with a severe urban heat island effect and wall-like buildings that block the wind and trap pollution.
Popularity: 5% [?]
December 23rd, 2009
Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”
“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”
Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”
She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.
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Popularity: 5% [?]
December 13th, 2009
When the curators of the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale began assembling exhibits for the urbanism and architecture showcase, they decided to focus on the theme of sustainability. It turns out that most of the artists, architects and designers who answered their call for submissions had the same idea.
“It’s almost a zeitgeist,” says Eric Schuldenfrei, one of the biennale’s four curators. “When you ask people for new work, the dialogue with nature is very strong. It might be subtle, but if you look for it, there is that element in almost every project in the biennale. It’s curated to an extent, but it’s also what everyone was already working on.”
Sustainability might be a buzzword, but the philosophy behind it goes far beyond a bit of greenery here and there. A scan of the biennale’s lengthy roster of exhibitions, installations, lectures and events shows a preoccupation with the question of how to reduce Hong Kong’s impact on the environment and bring city-dwellers back into contact with nature.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
November 17th, 2009
Photo by Tommy Wong
Stroll along one of the many beaches that are not regularly cleaned by the government and one thing is clear: Hong Kong has a rubbish problem.
When Dermot Mayes arrived at a remote beach near Pui O for the Coastal Cleanup Challenge, a month-long event in which 6,500 volunteers scoured Hong Kong beaches for trash, he was appalled. “We found car doors, fire extinguishers, wheelbarrows, quite a lot of medical equipment, quite of a lot of syringes,” said the managing director of Nomura, a financial conglomerate. “I’ve spent a lot of time hiking around Hong Kong, especially the shoreline areas, and it’s always been a bugbear of mine that the beaches and countryside are really quite badly littered.”
Mayes and his teammates spent three hours cleaning up the beach, but they were left with the nagging realisation that, for all their hard work, they were only treating a symptom of a much greater problem. Every year, more and more trash is found in Hong Kong’s waters. Last year, 12,900 tonnes of waste were cleared from the waters around the city, nearly double the amount recovered in 1998, when just 6,750 tonnes were collected. Another 15,500 tonnes were removed from gazetted beaches, which are cleaned daily by the government.
Overall, the amount of waste produced by Hong Kong has grown by 2 to 3 per cent each year since 2005. If the amount of trash keeps increasing each year, Hong Kong will run out of space in its landfills within five years.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
October 2nd, 2009
Lido Beach
Tsuen Wan, west of Kowloon, is known more as an industrial and commercial hub than as a seaside getaway. But until the early 1990s, the district’s seven sandy beaches, which stretch out along the Rambler Channel, were among the most popular in Hong Kong. As pollution from raw sewage worsened in the 1990s and 2000s, however, the beaches was closed for swimming.
Now, thanks to sewage improvement works, they may finally reopen within two years. Officials say water quality at the beaches is improving after work to channel and treat the waste, and they could be fit for use again by the summer of 2011.
The HK$1 billion scheme, which began early this decade, includes new trunk and branch sewers and a treatment plant at Sham Tseng, which was one of the first in Hong Kong to disinfect waste through ultraviolet radiation.
“Twenty years ago there were no sewage treatment facilities, no sewage works whatsoever in the area,” said Elvis Au Wai-kwong, assistant director of the Environmental Protection Department’s water policy division. “But the population of the area around the beaches increased by 42 per cent after 1996, from 26,000 to around 37,000.”
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Popularity: 3% [?]
August 17th, 2009
A Montreal heatwave is a funny thing. It’s really quite mild by any global standard — the media usually start braying about a canicule after just three days of temperatures above 30 degrees — but it has a real effect on this mostly air-con-free city. The normally languid pace of life becomes even slower and stickier as everyone indulges in the short-lived burst of heat and humidity. Terrasses fill up well into the night and the city hums with idle conversation and the nocturnal buzz of insects.
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Popularity: unranked [?]
August 2nd, 2009
Thanks to Quebec’s robust film industry, Montreal makes regular appearances as itself on the big screen, unlike other Canadian cities, which usually suffer the indignity of standing in for American metropolises. But it’s rare to see a feature film which Montreal is treated as a central character and not just a backdrop.
When you have scenes like this, courtesy of Flickr user beezart, you have to wonder why more filmmakers aren’t rushing to make more movies about la métropole.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
July 23rd, 2009
Hong Kong’s government has finally decided that sacrificing its air quality in favour of cars, buses and trucks isn’t such a good thing after all. Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising departure from its reluctance to make big plans, the government pledged to fight roadside air pollution by revamping the city’s vast bus network, planting more trees, expanding bicycle infrastructure, creating “low-emission zones” in the city’s most congested areas and permanently pedestrianizing nearly two dozen streets. Emission standards would also be tightened for boats and private vehicles.
While details on many aspects of the plan have yet to be confirmed — and of course it’s still just a proposal, with no guarantee that any of it will be actually put into place — it has the potential to drastically improve the quality of life in Hong Kong’s central areas. In Mongkok, the network of pedestrian streets already in place would be expanded, while vehicles that do not meet the highest European emission standards, known as Euro IV, would be banned from the entire neighbourhood. Vehicular access outside the pedestrian areas would also be limited.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
July 16th, 2009
When I wrote about the political and cultural importance of posters (not to mention their aesthetic contribution to the city by making it look messy and lived-in), I never considered that they could also have an environmental benefit. Luckily, two artists in Toronto, Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale, have demonstrated exactly how this can be done: they’ve turned lamppost posters into tiny planters.
How’d they do it? Spacing’s Jake Schabas has the answers. “First, they cut triangular shapes directly into the thick existing poster layers. Then they peeled back those layers, wrapping the outside edge of the cut-out posters back into the pole to form the cones.
“Only staples were needed to hold the cones in place and support the soil and flowers planted, with some cones needing extra poster paper wheat-pasted onto the underside. All of the cones have an aeration hole at the bottom and are placed in a corkscrew patter that allows water to flow from one plant to the next.”
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Popularity: unranked [?]
July 14th, 2009
Photo by Arianys León
Twice a year, a few weeks before and after the summer solstice, the setting sun aligns perfectly with the east-west axis of Manhattan’s streets in a phenomenon that has been dubbed “Manhattanhenge,” a reference to the way the sun aligns with Stonehenge during the solstices. It got quite a bit of attention this year, especially around its first instance, on June 1st. Sunday marked its second occurrence and there are Flickr photos to prove it.
Even though Manhattanhenge has been rather grandiosely described as a “unique phenomenon in the world, if not the universe,” it is replicated to some extent in other cities. Last month, Spacing Montreal’s Émile Thomas speculated that Montrealhenge might happened each year on June 12th. But the same effect is achieved almost every day: one of the things I miss most about Montreal is the way the sun sets in alignment with the city’s north-south streets, such as Park Avenue or St. Laurent, which pierces them with long bands of evening light. I would often walk up Park just as the sun was setting, admiring the long shadows and pillowy softness of the light.
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Popularity: 8% [?]
June 28th, 2009
I photographed this old (and perhaps abandoned) industrial building in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood just a few years ago. At the time, it was a captivating relic — almost entirely ensconced in graffiti, it was sprouting weeds that had either spilled onto the sidewalk, or had climbed up from the sidewalk onto it. The old orange car parked nearby added to the mystique; this was like a slice of 1970s New York.
That’s not entirely coincidental. Gowanus sometimes seems stuck in a time warp, a largely defunct swathe of industrial buildings dividing the homey brownstones of Carroll Gardens from the tony ones of Park Slope — neighborhoods that have been experiencing rapid change. Part of the reason the area is so moribund is its namesake Gowanus Canal, a brackish channel that has become the site of a raging local debate over whether it ought to be designated a Superfund site, allowing it to receive federal money for industrial cleanup.
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Popularity: unranked [?]
June 7th, 2009
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.
Popularity: 7% [?]
June 1st, 2009
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.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
Montreal Apartments