Archive for the Environment category
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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May 19th, 2009
Last year, on June 10th, a sudden storm blew into Montreal with hurricane strength. It was brief but intense as fierce winds toppled trees across the city, including this one on Milton Street in the McGill Ghetto.
April 9th, 2009
I never thought I would say this, but you know what? I miss grass. I miss being able to visit a park and do what I want in an expanse of unstructured space. Hong Kong doesn’t have many parks to begin with and those that do exist are invariably full of concrete, with greenery encased in planters or rigidly corralled into playing fields. There are lots of fences, too, so I can’t even enjoy the vast field down the street from me when it isn’t being used for rugby, soccer or cricket, because the gate is locked at night. I’m not asking for much — just a publicly-accessible lawn, open at all hours, where I can sit and read or play an informal game of soccer or throw down a jacket and have a nap.
March 25th, 2009
In Montreal, “river” usually means one of two things: the all-important St. Lawrence River, godlike in its power and presence, and the Rivière des Prairies, whose lazy nature is perhaps better reflected in its informal English name, the Back River. Before it was urbanized, however, Montreal Island was covered with creeks and rivers. Some have disappeared altogether, but many still exist, entombed in stone and concrete well beneath the city surface.
Andrew Emond, who first made his mark with well-seen photographs of abandoned buildings in Toronto and Montreal, recently embarked upon a quest to explore subterranean Montreal. His new blog, Under Montreal, is not only visually striking, it’s well-written and well-researched, with some fascinating entries on the city’s lost rivers. “Charting the evolution of the island’s creeks can often be a daunting task,” he writes. “Older maps from the early 1800s show only approximate paths with many minor creeks apparently deemed unworthy of inclusion. By the time more detailed maps started to emerge around 1820, we see that many of these watercourses had already started to disappear.”
Barely any traces remain. There’s a small stretch of creek—the ruisseau Provost, or Springrove Creek—remaining in an Outremont park, but that’s about it. “Even the twin ponds of Parc Lafontaine whose curves take the approximate shape of the creek that once passed through Logan’s Farm are concrete-lined fabrications,” writes Emond. To find what’s left of Montreal’s lost rivers, you have to go underground, which is exactly what Emond has done. Read about his exploration of the underground network of sewers and streams that make of the remnants of the Rivière Saint-Pierre.
March 16th, 2009
Imagine if you could walk through the doorway in one place and arrive elsewhere on the other side. Could we create a practical and easily replicable device that would allow for safe and simple instantaneous travel from one place to another regardless of the distance? How could the two doorways be connected? Once connected, what would you see inside the doorframe? Could you get chopped in half whilst passing through? Would such travel affect your body chemistry, DNA, atoms, etc.? Would differences in air pressure from both sides create gusts of wind or other differential phenomena? These are a few of the questions that quickly come to mind.
The previously invisible was made visible. To put this idea into perspective, the telephone has been around for less than 150 years. What was it that brought us to discover that we could project our voices across vast distances? Humans began to fly in the 1870s with the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon followed by the first ‘heavier than air’ flight by the Wright brothers in 1903. In the 1890s, the wireless was another strange inspiration that mobile telephone users do not even think twice about today, never mind high definition multi-channel satellite services. In less than 200 years of human evolution, all of these impossible ideas have become commonplace.
Gravity: what is this force that we have only superficially harvested for hydroelectric power generation? In what other way could this puzzling force be harnessed? How could it be related to magnetism and time? Could this all be explained by the fifth or another dimension? These are very big questions that physicists have been studying for a number of centuries.
Ideas about dimensional travel have been around for a long time. H.G. Wells published, The Time Machine, in 1895. Instantaneous travel is explored further in stories such as Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 book, A Wrinkle in Time, or the way the witches and wizards in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, first printed in 1997, are able to travel from one fireplace to another. The film, Stargate, released by MGM in 1994, also contributes to the canon of teleportation stories not to mention Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek from the 1960s. Nonetheless, the question remains how to adapt these ‘fantasies’ into a real world application?
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January 8th, 2009
Watering the plants in Shatin Park
On one of those smoggy days when you’re stuck in the crowds on Nathan Road, choking on diesel fumes and looking in vain for a bit of relief, it’s pretty hard to believe that country parks, city parks and natural areas make up more than half of Hong Kong’s landmass. It certainly makes you wonder that in a city surrounded by verdant hills and dotted by leafy rest areas, why do good parks seem so far away?
“There’s a bit of debate going around about whether or not we need more urban parks, but it’s never come together in a formal sense, so that’s what we’re trying to do here,” says Paul Zimmerman, one of the founders of Designing Hong Kong, an urban development watchdog that will co-present a discussion on the topic in this year’s City Festival.
In The Green Lungs of Hong Kong, a panel of officials from the government’s Leisure and Cultural Services and Agricultural and Fisheries departments, urban planning experts, and representatives from Hong Kong’s various green groups, will discuss whether access to country parks should be limited or encouraged, if Hong Kong needs more urban parks, and whether the parks it does have are accessible and well-designed.
“There’s pressure on land resources, especially now that we’ve decided to halt further [land] reclamation,” says Zimmerman. “The reality is that we’re not going to have any new land in the core area. Even if I might want to see more green spaces, that isn’t going to be easy to achieve. I think we can do more to get some more green in various places, more grass, green roof, green walls. Face it, people spending their lives in narrow streets face a sense of pressure. When there’s open space there’s a bit of breathing room and a chance to relax your mind.”
Zimmerman promises a lively debate about the role of parks in the city. Hopefully, for the city’s leaders, it will be a chance to hear new ideas; for concrete-weary city-dwellers, it might be one step closer to a breath of fresh air.
Another version of this preview was published in the January 7th issue of Time Out Hong Kong.
