Virtual World: The future of China’s largest city is on bombastic display at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre
Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.
Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.
Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.
Cranes, viewed from the 13th century Gulou, or Drum Tower, build the new Beijing
The view from Beijing’s Gulou, or Drum Tower, is dominated by the labyrinth of threadlike lanes — the city’s famous hutongs — spreading in all directions, filling in the superblocks formed by the city’s broad, rectilinear avenues. Gulou, built in the 13th century by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, is one of Beijing’s most popular — if not immediately recognizable — attractions, drawing thousands of visitors each year. The resulting crush of tour buses making their way into the drowsy, low-slung square outside the landmark may seem incongruous with the humble hutongs, but the area profits immensely. The square is lined with bars popular with both Beijingers and the Lonely Planet set, and rickshaw tours of the environs take off in all directions.
As a result, the neighborhood, also known as Gulou, has gentrified just enough to make it a good example of how the hutongs might prosper if preserved. Such slow, organic improvements to city life don’t seem to have impressed local government officials, though. The entire Gulou area is set to be demolished and “restored” with historicist buildings that will, allegedly, evoke the look and feel of Ming-era Beijing. This facelift will be for the supposed benefit of tourists alone; the neighborhood’s businesses will be purged, and its residents moved elsewhere.
The widespread eradication of Beijing’s hutongs has been well-documented for several years, and criticized as vehemently by locals as outsiders. Civil society opposition to the demolitions is now formally organized; in 2003, opponents of this form of destructive form of urban renewal founded the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center. But mere attempts to gain detailed information about the government’s plans for Gulou have proven as fruitless as any to limit or stop the neighborhood’s destruction.
Posters along the former green line calling for “real change.”
After years of foreign/militia rule, the Lebanese navy reasserts itself through this poster featuring a group of scowling teenage boys. “We’re back!” reads the caption in the lower left. Should we feel threatened or reassured?
A row of numbered tin shacks in Blikkiesdorp. Photo from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign
Nestled in a sun-kissed valley amid coastal mountains, pastel-hued, historic Cape Town is arguably one of the world’s most beautiful cities. So it’s long been a rude awakening for first time visitors expecting to arrive amid its sweeping vistas and colonial architecture that the N2, the highway stretching between the Cape Town’s airport and the city center, is lined by the handmade shacks that constitute the Joe Slovo informal settlement.
Nestled between the highway and the formal black townships established by the apartheid government on the Cape Flats, Joe Slovo was the result of the rapid population influx into South Africa’s cities since the end of racial discrimination in 1994 — and of the government’s inability to keep up with demand for housing, guaranteed as a right in South Africa’s progressive constitution.
In 2005, a fire that rapidly ate through Joe Slovo’s makeshift shacks left hundreds homeless. At the same time, the government began planning a permanent solution to the housing crisis that had produced the settlement, which was ironically named for Nelson Mandela’s first housing minister. Joe Slovo’s shacks were to be replaced by the N2 Gateway, a proper housing development. But first, Cape Town needed a place to put the refugees of the fire — and those whom it would eventually relocate to the N2 Gateway.
Enter Blikkiesdorp, officially the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area, and unofficially what translates from Afrikaans as, literally, “block village” — more often known as “Tin Can City” in English. Established in 2007, it was initially built to house another set of shack dwellers who had set up camp nearby — and it’s increasingly housing refugees from shack settlement and apartment evictions all across Cape Town. Enclosed by a thick concrete fence, constantly patrolled by vigilant police, its rows of numbered tin shacks have elicited comparisons to a concentration camp.
Centre des affaires de Montréal, ce jeudi de brume sèche. Agitation dans la populace : les grognons, les ronchons et autres cabotins s’en donnent à coeur joie, criant et maugréant à qui veut bien l’entendre que le Québec est à sa fin. Une bande de matamores, ravie d’avoir une cause à défendre : le droit à la richesse, menacé par les hausses de taxes.
Une conviction défendue avec ardeur, peu importe si cette aisance soit prise en dépit de la pauvreté flagrante des trois quarts de l’humanité. C’est désagréable d’y songer, mais mon confort douillet de néo-canadien dépend du sacrifice que les pauvres font de leurs propres vies, dans ces pays aux sonorités amusantes. Combien de Burkinabés, de Guatémaltèques ou d’Azerbaïdjanais devront connaître une mort prématurée pour que je puisse posséder ma tanière, manger du saumon fumé et rouler en VTT climatisé.
C’est que le dernier budget provincial, dont le propos stérile et superficiel ne m’atteint aucunement, fait “mal” à la classe moyenne. Exit la McMansion aux tourelles rigolotes néo-machinchouette. Exit la deuxième bagnole et pas de télévision tridimensionnelle pour 2010. L’horreur, finalement.
Earlier this week, in a Kwun Tong industrial building, three young people sat in a smoky studio talking about art, family and music. Every so often, they took a break and played a song from My Little Airport, an independent band known for its twee sound and ironic lyrics. After an hour and fifteen minutes — fifteen minutes longer than scheduled — they came out of the studio to make way for the next hosts.
All in all, a fairly ordinary night at Hong Kong’s newest radio station, FM 101, which launched last autumn and broadcasts both on the web and the FM dial. That wasn’t the case a week earlier.
On March 4th, police and officials from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) forced their way into the studio and seized $20,000 worth of transmitting equipment. FM 101 is a pirate radio station that broadcasts without a licence, which means its hosts and guests run the risk of hefty fines and even jail time. The station’s founders say they are deliberately circumventing Hong Kong’s broadcast laws in an attempt to force the government to open the airwaves to small, non-profit radio stations.
“All I want is a place to play indie music,” said Leung Wing-lai, 28, a musician and one of the station’s founders. “It’s absurd that this is illegal.”
In a winter marked by rallies and protests, young people unhappy with Hong Kong’s government are taking to the streets in more ways than one. Over the past year, Hong Kong’s street artists have left their mark with posters, stickers and stencil graffiti that attack some of the city’s most prominent politicians and business leaders.
The most recent example is a poster of Henry Tang Ying-yen, modelled on Barack Obama’s now-legendary “Hope” campaign poster, that depicts the government’s chief secretary laughing, with horns on his head and the Chinese character for “kill” branded on his forehead. “Devil” is written at the bottom, in English, along with a short phrase in Chinese: “Political reform killer.”
The poster, which first appeared in the streets last December, is the work of local street art crew Start from Zero, which until now has been known more for its black-and-white stencil art and t-shirt designs than for biting political commentary.
It’s two in the morning on Talaat Harb Street, the heart of downtown Cairo, and the sidewalks are sclerotic. People shuffle slowly past shop windows exploding with merchandise. An intense white light beams across the thoroughfare. Avoiding hawkers thrusting t-shirts in their faces, trying to lure them to clothes and sneakers piled in tables approximately every ten feet along the way, the throngs spill out onto the street, taking control most of the roadway, permitting only a lane or two for a line of taxis to proceed.
The scene doesn’t suggest it, but suburban flight is no stranger to Cairo. Its well-to-do are increasingly leaving the city center for suburban villas in the desert to the east, may now prefer to shop in tonier Heliopolis, or the cavernous (and, crucially, air-conditioned) City Stars Mall. Even a seemingly more entrenched presence, the American University, has largely decamped to a vast new McCampus on the city’s outskirts.
None of this seems to have affected the density of the crowd along Talaat Harb.
Here’s how to build a high-speed railway if you really want to piss off the public: don’t thoroughly consult the public, make sure it costs more than any other railway in the world (US$330 million per kilometre is a good starting point) and bulldoze a rural village of 3,600 to make way for it. When people start to get mad, act defensive and claim that if the railway isn’t built the whole economy will be sidelined.
Then you’ll have the situation we have here in Hong Kong, where the legislature approved funding for a HK$67 billion (US$8.6 billion) 26-kilometre high-speed railway, known as the “express rail” or gou tit in Cantonese, to the mainland Chinese border. When it’s completed — ostensibly by 2015, but likely later than that — it will link up with a huge high-speed rail network currently under construction in China.
While business leaders are eagerly awaiting the project’s groundbreaking, recent polls show that a majority of the population oppose the railway, whose construction will involve the demolition of Tsoi Yuen Village in the New Territories. (My friends Derrick Chang and Zoe Li put together a nice photoessay about the village for CNNGo.)
It was an unexpectedly warm day as Syren Johnstone stood, in shirt-sleeves and a bit of sweat on his brow, over a hole dug in the West Kowloon Reclamation site. He held a shovel in his right hand and stared down at a rusted reinforcing bar poking out of the earth.
“This is reclaimed land, but we’re still making archaeological finds here,” said Johnstone, who worked with two other architects, Kingsley Ng and Daniel Patzold, to create Excavation, a mock archaeological dig on the site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The biennale, which has attracted an eclectic range of installations and exhibits, is being held until the end of next month on a vacant part of the reclamation grounds, and covers about 73,000 square metres.
As the architects’ work progressed, they found the remains of construction waste that had been mixed with the soil used to reclaim the land — a reminder, Johnstone said, that something can never come from nothing. He turned and looked at the craggy grass and gnarly trees dotting the site, and the half-dozen unused shipping containers housing some of the works. “It’s becoming a bit like Christiania here,” he said, referring to the infamous anarchist enclave in Copenhagen. “People are just coming and doing all sorts of interesting things.”
Since it opened last month, the event has won plaudits for avoiding the academic stuffiness of many architecture showcases, first by situating itself outdoors but also by stressing public participation and the constantly evolving nature of art and architecture – concepts reflected in the theme, “Bring Your Own Biennale”.
But that approach came as much from necessity as it did from curatorial vision. Pressed for time and strapped for cash, the curators had no choice but to stage a more rag-tag production than they would have otherwise. From the beginning, the biennale’s curatorial team, led by the architect Marisa Yiu with partners Eric Schuldenfrei, Alan Lo and Frank Yu, had to work on a tight schedule and budget. They were awarded the curatorship in July, more than a year after the curators on the biennale’s Shenzhen side had been chosen. The disarray behind Hong Kong’s effort, some involved say, reflects the wider organizational problems holding back arts development in the city.
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.
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.
There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.
On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.
“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”
For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.
Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.
Last week, I posted a video by Thomas Lee in which he asked passers-by on Sai Yeung Choi Street where they would go if they could open a door to anywhere. Now he’s back with another great video, this time a (well-subtitled) Cantonese-language rap by MC Yan, whom you might remember as the founder of Radio Dada and one of the first Chinese rappers.
I helped produce this video (though I can’t claim much credit — after introducing him to MC Yan and participating in a brainstorming session, nearly all of the work was done by Thomas). What struck me from the beginning was how passionate MC Yan is about Hong Kong, despite the cynicism that defines his lyrics. He’s genuinely fascinated by this place, rooted to it not only by birth but by a desire to improve it, and the way he expresses that is through unrelenting criticism of Hong Kong’s government and leaders.
In the video, he takes us on a tour of three important parts of Hong Kong — Causeway Bay, Central and West Kowloon — drawing inspiration from the social, political and cultural geography of each.
