Hong Kong people aren’t very sentimental, but when Chan Tsu-wing told me about his life as a coxswain, I noticed a certain wistfulness creep into in his words.
“I love my job — it gives me the best view of the city,” he said while piloting the 45-year-old Silver Star across Victoria Harbour. He waved a hand across the view of emerald water bracketed by skyscrapers and mountains. “Look at this. This is the best place in the world.”
Chan has crossed the harbour thousands of times in his 27-year career with the Star Ferry, shuttling generations of commuters and tourists between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, witnessing the city’s stranglehold on the harbour grow tighter every year.
When Chan first joined the Star Ferry in 1984, Victoria Harbour was nearly half a mile wider than it is today. Over the next two decades of his career, the water grew rougher and more polluted. Marine life all but vanished. Chan told me that he used to see dolphins in the harbour, but no more.
Photos by Peter Morgan (top), and MatHelium (bottom)
Hop in any cab in any city of the world and you’re likely to be treated to lively political commentary. That’s especially true in autocratic regimes, where the availability of other spaces in which random strangers can meet and speak openly has often been severely curtailed. Cairo’s sprawling cityscape, for example — segregated swathes of sumptuous subdivisions and mudbrick shantytowns each stretching out into the desert — rendered such common ground rare.
Despite the vastness of Egypt’s capital, car ownership is a relative extravagance, and the growing but incomplete mass transit system barely reaches even a fraction of the population, making taxis among the most vital forms of transport. At any given moment, the city’s classic, black-and-white cabs form a huge percentage of the vehicles trapped in Cairo’s notorious traffic. According to Greater Cairo’s General Transportation Authority, over 50,000 were registered in the city in 2005. Unofficially, the number is around 80,000 (for comparison’s sake, New York and London have around 15k each).
Most are third-hand Yugos, Ladas, or other now-obscure brands imported decades ago from the Eastern Bloc, their drivers often chasing down, often to the exclusion of keeping their eyes on the road, any potential fare they can find. And yet, despite their general reputation for unpredictability, Cairo taxis’ regimented color scheme is also what grants the capital’s sometimes chaotic streets any sense of uniformity and order. But it wasn’t until I was leaving the country that I pieced together their deeper political significance — with the help of Khaled al-Khamissi’s then newly-translated book, Taxi.
Enroute out of Egypt, at 35,000 feet, I became absorbed in al-Khamissi’s chronicle of taxicab confessions — the book is a compilation of the thoughts he’d gathered from the drivers who plied the streets down on the ground that was receding far behind and beneath me. Many began to replay in my mind when Egypt’s historic protests began in January. For all the debate over how and whether social media stimulated the Egyptian Revolution, much less attention has been paid to the urban social networks that reached many more Egyptians than Facebook. Like honeybees, Cairo’s taxis didn’t just collect the fares that were their drivers’ sustenance; they also cross-pollinate ideas — helping to gather and spread political dissent.
I couldn’t quite glimpse Hosni Mubarak from my balcony in Garden City, but simply knowing that his portrait was nearby made me unable to shake the sensation of being watched. Not exactly towering over, but nudged by its rooftop mechanicals above the rooflines of the neighborhood’s decadently decomposing 19th century apartment houses was its home, the khaki hulk of the Ministry of Social Solidarity — more Orwellian in name than purpose. Mounted on its façade, the multistory banner depicting the longtime Egyptian president — slumping, casually, in shades — was what really gave the place its authority. I never encountered a more affirming symbol of Mubarak’s power than his pose on that photo: the longstanding ruler was so calm, collected, comfortable.
Dictators survive by avoiding blame and instilling awe. Both served Mubarak well. Russian peasants were said to have hated the czar’s officials — who constantly interfered in their daily lives — but to have loved the distant czar, whom they imagined, were he in touch, would ultimately set their lives right. Perhaps that’s why it was relatively hard to find, in Cairo, many more of the trappings — monuments, murals, political paraphanelia — that mark personally invested, ideologically rigid, and, hence, vulnerable regimes. It’s possible that, walking through Bolshevik Petrograd or late Maoist Beijing, you could have somehow put the omnipresent slogans and statues out of your mind, but in Cairo there seemed to be far less need.
True, Mubarak’s visage still gazed out from many posters, murals, and portraits, but their relatively low degree of frequency reflected the fact that his regime was more of a shadowy, bandit kleptocracy than a mass-murderous personality cult. Every classroom in Egypt apparently had an image of the president mounted on its wall, but they must have only made the president appear as a fixed, unresponsive certainty of daily life, or else an image that would recede in memories as quickly as algebra and playground fights. Many of the old posters were already fading by themselves. The bridges, streets, and stations named after the former president made him seem like a figure from distant history rather than someone who could be held to the consent of the governed.
By refraining from stuffing itself into Egyptians’ fields of vision, the regime also ensured it did not become a default excuse for the sometimes crumbling condition of the country or its inhabitants’ stagnant fortunes. That few, casual images of Mubarak produced — such as the one that hung from the ministry — spoke volumes about his removal from the people. As the revolution that broke out in January helped attest, they made the old ruler seem out of touch. Their isolation, for the longest time, made him seem untouchable.
Ronnie Wong’s swimming career began with a dive into Victoria Harbour. In 1968, the 16-year-old competitive swimmer joined hundreds of other men and women in a 1.5-kilometre race from the Star Ferry pier in Tsim Sha Tsui to Queen’s Pier in Central.
“The moment I jumped in the water, I didn’t care about anything, just to head towards City Hall as fast as I could,” says Wong. He won the race. He won the following two years as well.
But the race, which had been launched in 1912, soon came to an end. By 1978, the harbour had become so polluted that the race was cancelled. In its final decade, Wong remembers the swim was as much of an obstacle course as it was a race. “The water was so dirty you would bump into a dead chicken or a piece of wood,” he says.
Harbour pollution continued to worsen in the 1980s. In 1988, fewer than half the city’s beaches were clean enough to swim. Locally-raised fish and oysters were so toxic the public was warned not to eat them. The “fragrant harbour,” as Hong Kong is known in Chinese, became notorious for the sickening stench of its waters.
Recently, however, things have begun to change. In the mid-2000s, Wong, who competed twice at the Olympics and is now the secretary of the Hong Kong Amateur Swimming Association, went diving in the harbour’s waters and noticed they seemed cleaner than before. “Before, you couldn’t even see a few feet in front of you, but now you can see three to four metres away,” he says.
It was bound to happen. 26 months after Tsoi Yuen Village received its death sentence, 100 police officers burst into the remaining villagers’ houses and told them to leave.
The villagers were incredulous. “I was negotiating with the government peacefully only a few days ago,” one man, Cheung Sun-yau, told the South China Morning Post. Tuesday morning, after workers cut through his front gate, police pushed him into his house and searched him, before telling him that it was his last chance to leave before a new high-speed railway is built through the village.
Tsoi Yuen’s residents have been protesting their village’s impending demolition for more than two years. Despite an evacuation order last year, 60 villagers have chosen to remain as they continue to negotiate with the government for compensation. Yesterday, apparently, the government decided it had had enough.
“China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people,” announced a breathless headline in Sunday’s Telegraph, detailing plans to combine the cities of Guangdong province’s Pearl River Delta (PRD) into a massive urban conurbation. “Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan,” the British newspaper reported, noting that the new megalopolis would be “26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.”
The news generated quite a bit of chatter as it circled around the Internet, much of it predicated on the mistaken assumption that China would be building an entirely new city of 42 million. “What about all the cities already constructed but still empty?” wrote one commenter on CNNGo in reference to the master-planned, never-lived-in city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia. “Time to beef up security on the Hong Kong border,” tweeted a former Hong Kong resident.
The reality is less exciting. The PRD is already home to more than 42 million people and it already functions as a megalopolis with an economy worth a little under US$300 billion (about the same as the metropolitan areas of Shanghai, Boston, San Francisco and Milan). The billions of dollars in new infrastructure will complement an already well-developed network of highways, railways and waterways. In fact, the concept of a huge megalopolis tied together by roads and rail is nothing new: the Taiheyo Belt in Japan is an interconnected urban area of 80 million people linked by shikumen trains running every few minutes. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington form a mostly interconnected urban region of more than 50 million people.
“Everyone’s talking about the weather,” runs a loose translation of an old German political poster, “except us.” The slogan was used to parody a period railroad ad that trumpeted the Deutsche Bahn’s storm-resistant resilience, but it also attempted a deeper point: that meaningful politics is serious business, above the fray of such trivial, provincial preoccupations as the latest shower, hail, or frost.
In a recent essay at 3 Quarks Daily, Alyssa Pelish takes the other side of the argument. At first, she wonders whether talking about the three-day forecast might really be a sort of code obscuring some underlying purpose — functioning as a form of empathy, for example. Ultimately, she sees an even greater significance in sharing news about the weather: it provides one of the few “universally shared narratives” available to everyone.
It’s true that everyone experiences weather, full stop. But the way we do seems like it might be more effective at fostering individual communities rather than any single, universal one. Think, for example, of a snowstorm, when the collective, Herculean task of removing tons and tons of heavy, disruptive white stuff requires a city’s residents to work together — and, together, to interact with their government — at the most intimate, personal level.
“Everything you foreigners know about Argentina,” the older gentleman asserted, “you know from that Madonna movie.” We’re standing in Palermo Viejo, a trendy neighborhood miles away from the buildings and blocks that pencil in postcard Buenos Aires. If his statement — referencing Evita, the 1996 musical melodrama about Argentina’s most charismatic first lady — were true, outsiders would be thrown by what they found here. There’s little of the country’s trademark tango of mournful melancholy and testy protest politics present among Palermo’s buzzing bars and chic shops. This is not an Argentina that Evita would have ever had to ask to stop crying.
But Palermo is an asterisk on Buenos Aires’ cultural and political map. Elsewhere, BA is a city of brooding memory: the names of generals and battles overwhelm its street signs and the friezes of its major edifices. There’s even a “Parque de la Memoria” in the city’s far north, devoted to the victims of Argentina’s dictatorial Dirty War.
Natives to such history-saturated soil eagerly invoked Evita and her husband, Juan Peron, when the Kirchners (Nestor and Cristina), came to power in 2003 — each eventually taking a turn as president. The parallels went well beyond their power couple personas. Nestor’s gutsy decision to stand up to the IMF on Argentina’s unbearable debt burden earned him acclaim for rescuing the country’s finances. Along with later accusations the Kirchners were attempting to consolidate domestic power, the move helped breed deeper comparisons to their autarkic (and somewhat autocratic) predecessors.
The Kirchners, fittingly, slated a dusty lot just downhill from the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace, as the future site of a vast, permanent homage to Juan Peron. But however prevalent, Buenos Aires’ paint-spacked, graffiti-covered monuments are a reminder that Argentine politics offer only illusory glory. Power here has been made and unmade on the street. Raucous demonstrations for, against, or barely related to the controversy of the week are common in the Plaza de Mayo, the vast square reaching out from the front of the Casa Rosada — and tend to radiate well beyond.
That made it natural for many to gravitate to the Plaza on October 27, when word spread of Nestor’s untimely death — and the political shakeup it might portend. The resulting outbreak of national mourning begat a see-and-be-seen atmosphere of patriotic celebration, protest action, and all-out street carnival, coming to resemble the country’s passionate soccer matches more than any somber state vigil.
Old buildings bought for redevelopment are displayed in the window of an acquisition company office on Victory Avenue in Ho Man Tin
There goes the neighbourhood. A new government policy on compulsory sales in old buildings has led to a property gold rush in Hong Kong’s older districts, putting homeowners on guard and worrying many that well-established communities will be uprooted and destroyed.
Before April, acquisition companies working for developers had to buy 90 percent of a building’s units before they could force the remaining owners to sell. Now the government has lowered that threshold to 80 percent for buildings more than 50 years old.
The impact can be felt in places like Ho Man Tin, where up to 20 buildings in the few blocks just east of the MTR’s East Rail Line are now targeted for redevelopment. About half are being acquired by Richfield Realty, a company whose controversial acquisition methods include the hanging of large red banners over targeted buildings, a tactic that many homeowners say creates an atmosphere of intimidation.
“We’re very angry and upset to see those banners all over the place — it’s like a cancer that’s spreading throughout the city,” said Kobe Ho, a bookstore manager who lives on Waterloo Road in Ho Man Tin. Some of her friends in the neighbourhood have already been displaced by Richfield’s acquisitions.
“The new legislation has really sped up the process of urban renewal in Hong Kong,” said Wong Ho-yin, a member of the Minority Owners’ Alliance Against Compulsory Sales, which works with homeowners who do not want to leave their homes. “But urban renewal has so many negative effects, in terms of urban planning, social networks and protecting the rights of homeowners. It’s bad enough with the Urban Renewal Authority, but when the private sector gets involved, things are even worse.”
Le voyage commence à l’embarquement dans ce bus déjà trop plein – suite 747 – qui nous débarquera à l’aéroport P.E.T.
Et si ce même voyage commencait déjà, par ce chemin, au travers du centre des affaires montréalais – vaste esplanade commerciale – et qui nous dépose au pied de Marie-Reine du Monde. Notre cathédrale. Celle qui nous fait déjà rêver de Roma, de San Pietro au crépuscule. La vie, la bousculade. Le mouvement. Un espresso sur fond de paysage enflammé.
Aussi on embarque dans ce bus – franchement trop plein – et on défile au travers de Montréal, en glissant la pente vers les faubourgs du Sud-Ouest. On croise rapidement le marché Atwater, qui nous transporte jusqu’à la Méditérannée, et puis on suit la longue et paresseuse coulée du canal de Lachine. Des murs aux briques rouges, avec en arrière-plan, le Mont-Royal : arqué et coloré, en cette saison où l’automne ronge rapidement les arbres, les préparant pour ces trois longs mois d’hivers. On a un peu froid : cette carte postale nous donne le vertige, avec un certain de degré de romantisme. L’appel à l’infinie.
Just a brisk walk from the Ox Warehouse is another one of Macau’s contemporary art spaces: the Lun Hing Knitting Factory. When I arrived, a group of old people sat in the lobby playing mahjong as the security guard watched idly. There’s little to indicate the presence of artists, when I took the lift up to the third floor, I found the spacious new home of AFA Macau, an arts organization set up by six artists to host exhibitions, give artists space to work and promote Macau artists abroad.
Photographer James Chu Cheok-son and sculptor Wong Ka Long are two of AFA’s founding artists. “The art market in Macau is not well-developed — there are virtually no galleries,” said Chu as we sat at a table near the back of the gallery. AFA was established in 2007 when it opened artists’ studios and a gallery in partnership with a bar and restaurant next to the ruins of St. Paul’s. Last year, though, the financial crisis and decline in tourism took a toll on the restaurant’s business and AFA was forced to leave. It opened in the Knitting Factory late last year; they share the space with Macau Creative, a design group that often incorporates the work of Macau artists into its work.
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?
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