The Death of a Village

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.

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The Pearl River Megalopolis

Shenzhen from above

“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.

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Online Shopping in the MTR

The Internet meets the MTR: trying on a jacket bought online.
Photos by Oliver Tsang for the South China Morning Post

Nobody seemed alarmed by the sight of two 17-year-old boys playing with guns in the Hong Kong MTR. It was early Wednesday evening at Prince Edward Station and Kelvin Cheung was inspecting a pistol he had arranged to buy from Simon Lee.

“It’s for war games,” Cheung explained as he pulled the trigger on an empty semi-automatic air-powered handgun. He has been playing war games for six months, he said, and he found Lee on Uwants, an online marketplace. After confirming the sale online, they arranged to meet at Prince Edward to finish the transaction. Cheung paid HK$300 for the gun, which he said would have cost HK$570 in a retail store.

“This is my first time buying from Simon, but I actually have two other purchases I’m going to pick up in the station tonight,” said Cheung.

As the rush hour crowds thickened, about fifty other people milled around the edges of the station’s fare-paid zone, most of them waiting to pick up goods they had ordered online. Cash changed hands; so did makeup kits, concert tickets, cameras and bags full of clothing.

In most parts of the world, online shopping is a straightforward process: find what you want, enter your credit card information and have it shipped to your home. Not so in Hong Kong, where analysts describe the online retail market as “underdeveloped” and consumers have long been sceptical of buying things online.

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Europe on Two Wheels

Barcelona by the sea

Barcelona

Over the hill in Madrid

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Tunnel Vision: Subway Zoetrope

I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.

Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.

Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.

Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.

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The Cheonggyecheon Experience

What amazed me most about Cheonggyecheon was its freedom. Here was a stream running through the middle of Seoul, one of the world’s largest cities, and it gurgled as contentedly as any country creek. You can walk next to the water, sit next to it, wade in and feel its sharp chill on your calves.

It becomes all the more remarkable when you realize that, ten years ago, it was little more than a sewer running beneath a traffic-clogged highway. For decades, Cheonggyecheon was buried under an expressway; it was famously restored in the early 2000s. (David Maloney wrote an exhaustive account of its history a few years ago.) When I visited Seoul last year, it was one of the things I was most eager to see, and luckily enough, I happened to be staying a short walk from it.

After the expressway was demolished, a six-kilometre linear park was built along the stream, from the business district near Gwanghwamun in the west to another river, Jungnangcheon, in the east. The stream runs several metres below street level, and descending towards the stream is a liberation from the noise and exhaust above it. Late at night, I sat next to the water and watched two couples wade into the stream, pants rolled up, giggling as they splashed around. During the day, kids played on stepping stones that traverse the water.

Cheonggyecheon is one of the best-designed examples of urban nature I have encountered. Its impact has been fare-reaching. Fewer cars enter central Seoul now and public transit use is up. Summer temperatures around the stream have been reduced by several degrees since the stream was restored.

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Along the Buriganga

While railways are the nerves and sinews of India, rivers are the lifelines linking the cities and towns in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Last spring, I was in Dhaka, the congested capital, with my brother. The city of 14 million people lies on the banks of the Buriganga. After getting lost in the atmospheric narrow warren of streets in the old city for a few hours, our perspective eventually opened up upon reaching the wide, pitch-black river. Dozens of small canoes were parked on the trash-strewn riverbank. Skinny boatmen in lungis beckoned out for business with raised hands, offering to take people across. A one hour cruise can be had for a little over a dollar, probably less if you’re a miserly jerk who wants to argue over pennies.

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How to Clean Hong Kong’s Toxic Air

While Hong Kong’s air is significantly cleaner than cities in mainland China, its roadside air pollution is more than five times worse than other major cities like New York

Hong Kong’s roadside air pollution hit record-high levels last month, with new data from the Environmental Protection Department showing that pollution at roadside monitoring stations reached “very high” levels for 9.5 percent of the time in July, August and September. The previous record, set in 2004, was 8.2 percent.

The findings have added to growing alarm about the impact of roadside air pollution. Even as Hong Kong’s overall air quality improves, pollution in the streets is getting worse. But unlike other environmental problems, like climate change, environmentalists say there are a number of straightforward ways of dealing with roadside air pollution, by implementing stricter emission controls and reducing the amount of traffic on the streets.

“When the streets in Central are pedestrianized on Sundays, the air quality is fine, but on normal working days, it keeps getting worse,” says Hung Wing-tat, an associate professor of civil engineering at the Polytechnic University and a director of the Conservancy Association, a green group that has been lobbying the government for more action on air pollution.

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Montreal to Paris: Fog, Strikes, and Salmon

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.

Ce voyage promet d’être décisif.

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Passing Trams

Beyond the Second Ring Road

Beijing is at least two cities. There’s the Beijing of the hutongs, a largely low-slung, grayscaled cityscape lying along the occasionally meandering little streets one can find within the old city walls, a one to two kilometer radius of Tiananmen Square. Then there’s the rest of Beijing, a march of high and midrise office and apartment buildings that have both infiltrated the city of the hutongs and supplanted much of remains of Mao’s capital: the cheaply built factories and shambolic workers’ dormitories built beyond the old city.

There are pockets of modern construction all over Beijing’s historical core, but the incursion of the new Beijing into the old is only really consistent along the ten lane-wide route of Chang’an Avenue, the city’s ceremonial main east-west axis, which slices in half the heart of the city with flanks of flashy new banks and government office buildings. The rest of new Beijing lies out beyond the old city and its present outer limit: the Second Ring Road, Beijing’s innermost orbital expressway, which replaced hutong Beijing’s medieval defenses with a different sort of wall — one formed by bumper-to-bumper traffic.

It didn’t always seem as if this division would persist. Only a few years ago, the Beijing of the hutongs began disappearing at an alarming rate. The outcry among preservationists, though, was loud enough to slow large-scale demolition, and changes to the historic city have proceeded somewhat less rashly since; some hutongs that were spared the wrecking ball have even undergone gentrification. There are exceptions, of course. Limited demolitions still occur — to install new subway stations, for example. But large-scale redevelopment projects, like this year’s plans to wipe out the classic hutong neighborhood around the historic Gulou, or Drum Tower, have gone nowhere fast; after unusually intense local and global media scrutiny, the Gulou project was shelved indefinitely.

The slowdown of Beijing’s “modernization” has brought with it a stalemate between high-rise and hutong. It’s particularly evident in Xicheng, in the western part of the old city, where the shimmering but somewhat stumpy towers of Beijing Financial Street, intended to form the new commercial heart of China, rise awkwardly against a backdrop of some of the city’s dustiest laneways. And not far away, across the Second Ring Road, the chaotic streetlife of the hutongs has even found a foothold even amid the seemingly hostile, modern streets and plazas of the new city.

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Rush Hour in London, 1970 and Today

Bulbous black taxis and double-decker buses might supply London’s most recognizable transport iconography, but Britain, where the railroad was born, has long been a nation defined by trains. A look at two videos of London’s rail station at rush hour confirms the country’s undying regard for rail. The crowds pulsating through Waterloo Station in 1970 were at the mercy of the antiquated, almost Steampunk-styled signal equipment featured in the first video, a British Transport Film fished up from the archives of the British Film Institute last year, but if they were at all aware of this, it didn’t stop them from swarming the station in droves (though, being British, they also manage to organize the chaos into an occasional orderly queue).

Not even the materialism of the Thatcher years, their emphasis on homeownership, nor subsequent real estate booms, all of which promoted car ownership and the expansion of the London’s suburban commuter belt along the motorways radiating from the city, could seriously challenge British railways’ importance. Still less hemorrhage resulted from the 1993-7 privatization of the UK rail system, achieved, in the eyes of many, for no practical purpose and with disastrous results; in fact, traffic since privatization has actually increased, even as public impressions of the railways’ reliability and safety have declined. More passengers were carried in 2006 than in any year since 1957.

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Subway Vigilante

It feels a bit weird to admit this, but I actually prefer taking the bus over the MTR — Hong Kong’s clean, efficient metro system — because it keeps me sane. The bus might take twice as long, but at least I’m not shoved aside by people rushing into the trains at stops, or squished into a corner by the rush hour masses.

Every time I ride the MTR, I witness some kind of egregious behaviour that I wish I could punish with a slap across the face or a kick to the groin. I’m obviously not alone, because Mark Tjhung, an editor at the local edition of Time Out magazine, has fulfilled my daily dream: he became a subway vigilante. In a video that accompanies a column about rude behaviour on the MTR, Tjhung poses as an officer of the “MTR Police” and gives out tickets for infractions he sees while riding the trains (along with a yellow card, soccer-style, just for kicks).

Unfortunately, Tjhung is mistaken for a real MTR employee, and his first order of business is to deal with a pile of vomit somebody has left on the platform. The video is also somewhat disappointing — we get to vicariously chastise a kid who sits blithely in front of the hobbled old lady standing in front of him, and smirk as Tjhung gives a ticket to a teenager drinking bubble tea on the train, but we don’t have the satisfaction of seeing justice brought to the absolute worst human beings on the MTR: the door-rushers.

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The Childish Folly of Dubai

Dubai feels like it was designed by a five-year-old boy. What kid doesn’t get excited about the BIGGEST BUILDING EVER, or the WORLD’S BIGGEST MALL? And then there’s the idea of a SEVEN STAR HOTEL. Wow!

A real kid’s drawing would have these elements laid out side-by-side, in two dimensions. Drawings by five-year-olds generally don’t have much perspective or depth. Dubai’s recent urban planning efforts seem to lack them as well. Where else can you visit a city that actually implemented all those dumb ideas you thought were cool in kindergarten? And that laid them all out as ineptly as you would have when you were five?

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