Archive for the Environment category
August 15th, 2010
This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition of Muse magazine. The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.
Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that it took a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years. “We’ve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long,” she said, looking up at a rusted balcony on this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. “But we couldn’t convince the government to save the whole street.”
That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the street — with its single row of tong laus built just before and after World War II — as the perfect backdrop for their weepy drama about a shoemaker’s family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting the narrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in Hong Kong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group of architects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of the buildings on Wing Lee Street.
Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site. For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement was only a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entire approach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that is sensitive to the environment, that enhances the city’s streetlife and sense of community and that respects Hong Kong’s history and heritage. “Right now, developers can do whatever they want, and they’re facilitated by the government. We need planning controls,” she said.
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August 3rd, 2010
On the list of urban nuisances, rats rank somewhere below high rents and above loud neighbours. This summer, though, they seem determined to make it to the top of the list. Rat attacks have sent three people to hospital in the past two months alone. In Happy Valley, rats were seen scurrying across a children’s playground in broad daylight. Rats have even descended on squeaky-clean Discovery Bay, where residents have reported an infestation in the main plaza and along the shoreline, where rats were seen stealing food from turtles.
Data from the Hong Kong government shows that the city’s rate of rat infestation is significantly lower today than it was ten years ago. That’s cold comfort to the British tourist whose feet were gnawed by a rat on Pottinger Street in late May, or the woman bitten in a Lam Tin supermarket in June, or the man who suffered a bite two weeks ago while taking an afternoon nap at his home in Kwun Tong. One question is on everyone’s mind: what’s going on?
“It’s the heat,” said Keith Wong, the business manager of Johnson Group, one of Hong Kong’s largest pest-control companies. When the temperature rises outdoors, it becomes too hot for rats to stay underground, where they usually live — so they venture outdoors, sometimes even during the day. Poor hygiene makes the problem worse, he said, by luring rats into areas they might not normally go.
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July 18th, 2010
Wang Tong’s Ghost Tree. Photo by Larry Feign
Furious residents of a village on the south side of Hong Kong’s Lantau Island say government workers have been hacking at the roots of a landmark rubber tree, raising questions about the government’s declared effort to improve tree management.
Last Saturday, cartoonist Larry Feign was riding his bicycle near his home in Wang Tong Village, Mui Wo, when he saw three men standing near the base of the so-called Ghost Tree, a large Indian Rubber Tree that has stood in Wang Tong for at least 30 years. As he approached, he noticed two of the men chopping at one of the tree’s roots with axes.
The workers explained that they were building a new drainage channel to cope with runoff from a nearby slope that had recently been reinforced with concrete by the Civil Engineering and Development Department (CEDD). Feign was then joined by his wife, Cathy Tsang-Feign, an avid gardener who grows many varieties of trees on her property.
“I said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ and the foreman said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re just chopping down some roots to make a drain,’” said Tsang-Feign. “At the time I was there they were chopping quite a few younger roots. If I had come out 15 minutes later they would have been chopping into the main root. The damage would have been fatal.”
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July 15th, 2010
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
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June 2nd, 2010
For the last couple of weeks, bees have been buzzing around flowers growing wild in a former industrial space that may become an unusual urban park — or a municipal heavy machinery yard.
The land is located between de Gaspé and Henri-Julien streets, immediately south of the Canadian Pacific rail tracks, with a spur jutting west between the tracks and Bernard Avenue. Its southern boundaries are marked by big buildings put up for light manufacturing in the mid-1950s to 1970s which, for the most part, are no longer used for that purpose. The rail line also gets much less traffic: CP is getting rid of its switching yards to in nearby Outremont, where housing and a new health science campus for the Université de Montréal are scheduled to be built.
For more than 20 years, the vacant land has seen more and more people cross it to get from the Rosemont metro station to the software companies and artisan space now located in the old buildings. The land is also used for dog walking and some late night revelry. Increasingly, too, the wonders of nature in an urban setting have come to the attention of people living in the surrounding area. In the summer time, the overgrown fields are full of blue-flowered chicory, tall clover, Queen Anne’s lace, wild oats and other lovely plants that flourish on the edges of development.
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May 31st, 2010
Jim Chi-yung normally walks with a steady, deliberate pace, but on the grey afternoon of February 4th, he broke into an uncharacteristic sprint, running from his office at the University of Hong Kong to a friend’s waiting car. He was heading to Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon Tong, where the future of a tree was at stake.
Last year, Maryknoll had a decided to chop down a 20-metre-tall Norfolk Island Pine that leaned to the north and seeped resin from its trunk, giving the eerie impression that it was crying. The schoolgirls called it the Ghost Pine. Since it was planted in the late 1930s, it had become an emblem of Maryknoll, which is one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious private girls’ schools. The decision to fell the tree was met with a furious response from Maryknoll’s network of well-connected alumni, who called Jim for help. He helped publicize the case and after a flurry of media attention, the school backed off.
But in January, a crew of contractors dug a trench around the pine and severed most of its roots. The school declared that the tree could not be saved. Its felling was scheduled for February 5th. When he arrived on the afternoon of the 4th, he asked to look at the tree, but the school’s administrators refused. He looked worried. “Like a doctor who will use every effort trying to save a patient, immediate stabilization work can be imposed on the trunk instead of cutting the tree immediately,” he told reporters.
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April 30th, 2010
Chaotic, polluted, the cradle of Cantonese culture — these were some of the ways I had heard Guangzhou described before I visited last month. Reality was a bit different. It wasn’t chaotic at all; in fact, it was rather calm and orderly for a Chinese city. It was also less Cantonese than I expected. Cantonese is still the language of the majority, and this is reflected in subway announcements and TV commercials on outdoor video screens, but Mandarin has become the lingua franca in large parts of the city and some areas, like around Sun Yat-sen University or the in the orderly streets of Tianhe district, suffer from a generic “anywhere, China” feel, a kind of placelessness.
The one thing that was true to my expectations was the pollution, which blankets the city in a near-constant grey haze. Despite the air quality, though, I was amazed at how green Guangzhou is. Trees take pride of place in many of the city’s streets; apartment balconies are filled with potted plants; elevated expressways are covered with vines. It seems that, unlike Hong Kong, Guangzhou never dispensed with greenery as it urbanized. The warm, humid climate certainly helps: dilapidated buildings are covered in moss and plants grow out of cracks in the stone or cement. Nature, it seems, is keeping pace with Guangzhou’s incredible economic growth.
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January 26th, 2010
Hong Kong’s public housing estates are going green. In recent years, the Housing Authority has been using its estates as laboratories for the latest green technologies, a move that could help reduce Hong Kong’s air pollution and encourage more sustainable building practices.
Some of the authority’s latest efforts can be seen in Yau Lai Estate, a newly-built housing estate in Yau Tong that opened last year. Standing near the estate’s main entrance are three green walls covered in a mix of grass and climbing plants. While the walls also serve a decorative purpose — the arrangement of red and green plants on one is based on a drawing of a fish made by Yau Tong schoolchildren — a study completed last November found that the greenery cooled temperatures on the walls’ exterior surface by up to 16 degrees. Temperatures on their interior surface dropped by 1.5 to 3.5 degrees.
If the green walls are adopted on a widespread basis, they could significantly reduce housing estates’ energy consumption by cutting air-conditioning costs, said the Housing Authority’s chief architect, Clifford Cheng Chiu-yeung. They would also help cool the outside ambient temperatures. That in turn would reduce Hong Kong’s urban heat island effect, which has been making summer weather even hotter and more unstable than normal.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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