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.
This might be an odd thing to say about Hong Kong, but the place lacks spontaneity. For all of its hustle and intensity, it’s awfully beholden to routine: every day, the same street markets, the same packed MTR trains, the same carnival of consumerism. Even the political protests, though frequent, are quite orderly, almost choreographed.
So thank goodness for things like Detour, a new art and design festival that is headquartered at the old Married Police Quarters, a wonderful 1950s-era housing block (home to Hong Kong’s chief executive in his early years) that was once home to police families and is now empty and abandoned. Just a few years ago, it was meant to be sold and redeveloped, but it has now been preserved and earmarked for creative uses like Detour.
Detour is run by the Ambassadors of Design, a well-funded group whose stated mission is to make Hong Kong into a more creative city; among the events it organizes are Pecha Kucha Night, Cut and Paste and the Business of Design Week.
I recently sat down to write an article about the municipal elections. I started reading up about the candidates, browsed their pages, explored some of the Montreal blogs. And the more I read the more depressed I became, to the point that the only way I was able to regain sanity was through a marathon session of SimCity 4, in which I decided to regain the trust of my simulated citizens by installing a tramway on my own personal Côte-des-Neiges Boulevard. Believe you me, I fixed transportation for a generation, and it’s all totally sustainable.
See, I like SimCity. By now it’s an old game, but it’s still a classic. As the benevolent mayor of a few hundred thousand simulated yous and mes, I can flex my muscles and do whatever I like. A housing project in my way? Bring in the bulldozers. I’ve installed add-on packs for everything you can think of: elevated trains, pedestrian malls, depressed freeways. In my town of Saint-Sam-sur-Richelieu, or whatever the current mayoral endeavour is called, there are no elections to speak of—but if I’m reeling from the strain of low mayoral ratings, I can always just build a few landmarks. I drop Statue of Liberty here; a Petronas Tower there.
The basement of a shopping mall is the last place you’d expect to find the stirrings of a revolution, but that’s exactly what is happening in a tiny studio on the bottom floor of Langham Place. For the past year, Radio Dada has been dishing up indie music and irreverent discussion about Hong Kong arts and culture. Not only is this volunteer-run operation Hong Kong’s only independent radio station, its internet-based approach finally breaks free of the shackles that bind Hong Kong’s airwaves.
“Radio Dada is an experiment on how to build a radio station in Hong Kong,” says rapper and graffiti writer MC Yan, who is also the station’s musical director. “People are surprised that we do it without any money. But it’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Hong Kong is full of self-censorship, it’s way worse than in China. People here have no guts and no balls. We’re here to fix that.”
Despite Hong Kong’s reputation as a bastion of free expression, it’s actually illegal to run an independent radio station here. Only three radio stations — two of them commercial, one run by the government — are allowed to broadcast over the air. Nobody else has succeeded in getting a broadcast licence. In 2005, when a band of pro-democracy activists started a pirate station, Citizens’ Radio, that broadcast weekly political commentary, their offices were raided by police.
On dirait que le prochain Big Owe au Québec sera, en effet, un deuxième Big O. Un gros O en orange, pour préciser, qui amènera ses usagers en comfort et luxe sous la plaine banlieusarde de Laval, coupant dramatiquement le temps de parcours entre les deux bouts de la ligne. Gilles Vaillancourt, vous avez de quoi être fier : vous avez donné un beau nouveau jouet à vos électeurs.
Quand on était à l’école primaire, on nous a toujours dit qu’il est plus facile d’obtenir ce qu’on veut si on travaille avec ses camarades. C’est donc encourageant de constater que les maires des trois plus grandes municipalités dans notre région ont chacun fait leur tour en école primaire. Avec rien de plus qu’un coup de crayon – sauf peut-être des ‘consultations’ en huis clos – nous avons collectivement décidé de faire prolonger notre métro. Déjà reconnu autour du monde, il sera bientôt étendu au reste du monde. More
Few things are as contentious and politically charged as the names of where we live, so it’s not surprising to see toponymy back in Montreal’s political spotlight, three years after the Park Avenue/Parc Avenue/avenue du Parc debacle. Earlier this week, a variety of nationalist groups began to advocate the renaming of Amherst Street, ostensibly because its namesake, Jeffrey Amherst, an officer of the British Army who helped conquer Quebec in 1760, advocated the genocide of North America’s native peoples.
Fair enough, I guess. There has long been a movement to give Lionel Groulx the boot from the St. Henri metro station that bears his name because of what he thought and said about Jews. Thing is, in the case of both Amherst and Groulx, as much as their beliefs and actions would be unacceptable today, they were in keeping with the general attitudes of their time. Groulx was far from the only anti-Semite in pre-WWII Canada; Amherst was not the only military leader who engaged in despicable tactics to win a war.
Besides, plenty of other unsettling people whose names have been enshrined in the landscape. If we want to get rid of all of the skeletons in our toponymical closet, we have a lot of cleaning to do, starting with Christopher Columbus (genocidal imperialist), René Lévesque (lethal drunk-driver), Maurice Duplessis (corrupt autocrat) and Saint Zotique (he wasn’t even a saint!).
Then: a row of ornate stone houses graced by balconies and verandas. Now: a parking garage. It’s a sharp contrast typical of the then-and-now images posted by Lee Chi-man on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. For two years, under the alias HK Man, he has taken old photos of Hong Kong street scenes and paired them with new photos shot at the same locations and angles.
Lee’s simple juxtapositions highlight the city’s drastic pace of change over the last century. They reveal enormous differences between Hong Kong’s past and present, including the near-total disappearance of the shantytowns, colonial villas and low-rise shophouses that once dominated the city’s landscape. Plenty of interesting minor changes are also evident. Over the past few decades, sidewalks have been hemmed in by grey metal railings; open, cluttered shopfronts have been glassed-in and tidied up; and flyovers and pedestrian footbridges, once rare, have become ubiquitous.
“Old Hong Kong had such a special feel,” says Lee, a computer animator born in the 1970s. “I can’t understand how change has come so quickly. It actually makes me upset. The old Hong Kong you see in photos has been destroyed.”
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.
“Freedom! I want freedom! Let me go!” The woman’s arms were flailing wildly, and she was shouting at a police officer standing guard at the intersection of Christopher and Greenwich Streets. Her gesticulations could have been mistaken for a political protest — she was, after all, among the hundreds pressed against the crowd control barriers, not more than a few feet from which New York’s gay pride parade was moving past: an hours-long stream of floats and dancers coursed down Fifth Avenue and filtered into ever-narrower Village streets before reaching the route’s terminus near the foot of Christopher. But it turned out all she really wanted to do was cross the street and get home.
For all the inconvenience and discomfort of hosting a full-scale urban celebration along its slim sidewalks and underneath the drooping limbs of its trees, though, there could be no more poignant destination for the parade than Christopher Street, where, forty years ago, an uprising began the U.S.’ gay rights movement.
Whenever you come across a particularly charming and surprising corner of Hong Kong, you can almost be sure that the Urban Renewal Authority has plans to do away with it. Although its official vision is “to create quality and vibrant urban living in Hong Kong,” most of its developments obliterate tight-knit communities and organic urban growth in favour of shopping malls, office developments and housing estates. Cynical Hong Kongers see the URA as a proxy for the big land developers that control this town; its projects are usually little more than land grabs for Hong Kong’s economic elite. Aside from displacing well-established neighbourhood social networks, they replace small-scale, independent businesses with corporate chain stores, which degrades the entrepreneurial spirit on which this city was built.
I’d noticed it before, but the significance of the Democracy Wall, a bulletin board outside the University of Hong Kong’s main library, didn’t strike me until earlier this spring. When I first saw it, I thought its name was a wry reference to the brick wall that became a popular venue for dissent during 1978’s Beijing Spring, a brief period of political liberalization that occurred after the end of the Cultural Revolution in late 1976. But halfway through the school year’s second semester, I began to notice the ever-growing cluster of students who stared intently at the photos, essays and posters tacked neatly on the board. I took a closer look and realized that the Democracy Wall was more than just a reference to a short-lived burst of free expression in post-Mao China: it was a response to the June 4, 1989 crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, which traumatized Hong Kong and left a lasting impression on the city’s consciousness.
Each spring, as the anniversary of the crackdown approaches, the Democracy Wall plays host to a lively debate between HKU students over whether the Chinese government’s response to the student protests was appropriate. It’s a debate that echoes a much larger political division in Hong Kong. The conservative establishment, led by the business elite, tends to emphasize China’s economic progress since 1989, implying that even if what happened at Tiananmen was terrible, there’s no need to dwell on the past. The liberal, pro-democracy opposition insists that the Chinese government needs to acknowledge what happened, admit that it was wrong and reverse its policy of suppressing information about the events. The debate at HKU was complicated by the fact that many students come from the mainland, where they were never taught about the massacre. Some are shocked to learn about what happened, but others, like their conservative Hong Kong counterparts, insist that it was justified.
Interest in Tiananmen has waned in recent years, but its impending twentieth anniversary has reignited passions, and June 4th is once again a major issue in Hong Kong. A yearly poll conducted by the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme found that 61 percent of Hong Kongers feel that the central government must reverse its position on the Tiananmen Square incident, compared to 49 percent last year. 69 percent feel that China “did the wrong thing” in suppressing the demonstrations. Considering all of this, then, it seems that Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, did not have much of a feel for the public mood when he claimed in a meeting of the Legislative Council that most Hong Kong people want to forget about June 4th and move on. He probably wasn’t prepared for the wave of anger that then washed over him — consider My Little Airport’s hastily-made music video response, “Donald Tsang, Please Die.”
There were quite a few differences between the protest against police brutality, which took place some weeks ago, and the mobilization against the Turcot interchange. For one thing, the march against police brutality was dominated by police in full-on riot gear struggling to handle violent protesters. The mobilization against the Turcot, on the other hand, only had two unlucky souls from Transports Québec in their fluorescent vests, surely wondering what they were doing out on a Sunday afternoon.
It’s really too bad for our transport ministry. The problem they face is clear: a decrepit interchange. The solution ought to be equally simple: a new interchange, conceived to solve the problem at hand but better-built, longer-lasting, more conscientious of the surroundings. And a little more capacity for future needs.
And yet! The moment you try to get something done, it all breaks loose. Costs balloon and constituencies seep from the woodwork. Neighbourhood groups! Urban planning students! Blogs! And the next thing you know, your agency is vilified left and right. You’re destroying the city.
So, let me get this out of the way first-thing: there is currently an interchange here, and for the time being, there isn’t a way around that fact. And furthermore: if the Turcot were annihilated tomorrow, we would not necessarily be better off.
See, it’s not in question that in some ways, interchanges are Bad Things. They’re noisy, polluting, and ugly. They interrupt the Urban Fabric, which as we all know is sacrosanct. And this interchange, in particular, is a Really Bad Thing: it’s crumbling, it’s on land which could be put to much better use, it’s unsafe, it’s hard to maintain, it “enabled the entire West Island,” et cetera. I agree with all of this.
Hot dog vendor at Spadina and Queen. Photo by Kevin Steele
Toronto is finally getting the street food it deserves. After suffering under years of legislation that prohibited nearly everything but precooked sausages from being sold on the streets, vendors will now be able to serve food from hundreds of culinary traditions.
There’s just one problem: rather than embracing liberalized street food and all of its potential, City Hall is taking an overly bureaucratic approach. Just eight street vendors, out of a total of 19 that applied, will participate in a pilot project that will see Afghan chapli kebabs in Nathan Phillips Square, Ethiopian injera at Roundhouse Park and jerk chicken at Yonge and St. Clair, to name a few delicacies that have been specially chosen for their “nutritional value” and representation of Toronto’s ethnic makeup. Every aspect of the vendors’ operations will be tightly controlled: each one must use a custom-designed food cart (which range in price from $21,000 to $28,000) and they can’t deviate from their designated location.
City officials are concerned about food safety, naturally enough, but they’re also fussy about the nutritional value of what street vendors dish up, having gone so far as to pass a bylaw last December to ensure that street food is not only more “culturally diverse,” but “wholesome and nutritious.” It seems they want to discourage competition among vendors, too, since they’ve gone to great lengths to designate a handful of disparate locations at which street food can be sold under the new program.
It’s a remarkably heavy-handed approach, one at odds with the world’s great street food traditions, which are grounded in the ability to adapt quickly and flexibly to customer demand. Think of something like the now-famous Kogi taco truck in Los Angeles, which serves up Korean-inspired tacos from a roving truck whose location is announced only by Twitter and word-of-mouth. It’s innovative, delicious and exactly what people want — but it would be impossible in Toronto, where food vendors aren’t allowed to move around.
People less cynical than me can consider Toronto’s new approach a step towards street food freedom. But it’s an awfully small step. Even if this pilot project works out, what will dissuade city officials from micromanaging every future street food venture?
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