Clean(ish) Water at Last

For years, the seven beaches along Hong Kong’s Rambler Channel presented swimmers with a conundrum: awesome views, filthy water. Pollution at the beaches was so bad in the 1990s that the government withdrew lifeguards and put up banners warning people not to enter the water.

Now, more than a decade after the beaches were closed, new sewerage and water treatment facilities have improved the water quality to such an extent that the government has deemed it clean enough for swimming. Lifeguards will return to four of the beaches next summer and the rest will be re-opened by 2013, when new changing rooms and other facilities are built.

The water quality at Anglers’, Approach, Casam, Gemini, Hoi Mei Wan, Lido and Ting Kau beaches has improved by 70 percent since 2005, according to figures released earlier this month by the government.

That improvement comes thanks to a new water treatment plant in Sham Tseng and the opening last year of a new sewerage system in the villages along Castle Peak Road, which had previously relied on leaky septic tanks. So far, 210 of the area’s 400 village houses have been connected.

“These seven beaches have been subjected to different sources of pollution from every direction since the 1990s,” said Elvis Au Wai-kwong, the Environmental Protection Department’s assistant director of water policy. Raw sewage flowed directly into the sea from restaurants and houses, a problem that intensified as the population near the beaches increased from 26,000 in 1996 to 37,000 today.

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Vancouver’s Most Brilliant Public Space

Vancouver’s cityscape is defined not as much by gorgeous architecture or dynamic streetlife as by the natural beauty that surrounds it. You can’t escape the green mountains visible from every angle, the deep blue water that twinkles at the end of hilly streets, the Douglas Firs standing tall in front yards. Even the glass apartment towers that have become a symbol of the city’s progressive urbanism are designed less to shape the city than to facilitate the gaze beyond it.

It’s perfectly appropriate, then, that Vancouver’s greatest public space is not a street or a square but a beach. English Bay Beach, located next to downtown Vancouver, is a crescent sweep of sand with a view of the bay where George Vancouver met Dionisio Galiano in 1792. It is a natural gathering spot, located at the terminus of two commercial streets, near the entrance to Stanley Park. Here, the city doesn’t just brush up against the sea, it spills right into it.

A little over a century ago, the beach was littered with swimming shacks, holiday houses and hotels. A burly man from Barbados, Joe Fortes, made his home in a small beachside house, where he taught a generation of young Vancouverites to swim. He became the city’s first official lifeguard in 1901. After his death in 1922, the Vancouver parks board began buying up beachside properties in order to build a public open space. In 1989, 16 Chinese windmill palm trees were planted near the beach to give it a more tropical appearance, an experiment that has been so successful that another hundred palms have been added to the beachside promenade.

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Three Months Till Beach Weather

It’s a drizzly, damp 10 degrees in Hong Kong right now. Not ideal for going to the beach. By mid-May, though, when the variable weather of spring gives way to the muggy heat of summer, places like Shek O will beckon once again.

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One Minute in Little Vancouver

With the Olympics industry a-churning and global media attention now devoted to Vancouver, at least for the next two weeks, this tilt-shift time-lapse video might make a good introduction to the city for those who know nothing about it. Unfortunately, it lacks the wit and narrative drive of Keith Loutit’s similar videos of Sydney, and it’s little more than a tourist postcard, but it’s still fun to watch.

Ting Kau

Ting Kau Village, Hong Kong

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Hong Kong’s Rubbish Problem

Photo by Tommy Wong

Stroll along one of the many beaches that are not regularly cleaned by the government and one thing is clear: Hong Kong has a rubbish problem.

When Dermot Mayes arrived at a remote beach near Pui O for the Coastal Cleanup Challenge, a month-long event in which 6,500 volunteers scoured Hong Kong beaches for trash, he was appalled. “We found car doors, fire extinguishers, wheelbarrows, quite a lot of medical equipment, quite of a lot of syringes,” said the managing director of Nomura, a financial conglomerate. “I’ve spent a lot of time hiking around Hong Kong, especially the shoreline areas, and it’s always been a bugbear of mine that the beaches and countryside are really quite badly littered.”

Mayes and his teammates spent three hours cleaning up the beach, but they were left with the nagging realisation that, for all their hard work, they were only treating a symptom of a much greater problem. Every year, more and more trash is found in Hong Kong’s waters. Last year, 12,900 tonnes of waste were cleared from the waters around the city, nearly double the amount recovered in 1998, when just 6,750 tonnes were collected. Another 15,500 tonnes were removed from gazetted beaches, which are cleaned daily by the government.

Overall, the amount of waste produced by Hong Kong has grown by 2 to 3 per cent each year since 2005. If the amount of trash keeps increasing each year, Hong Kong will run out of space in its landfills within five years.

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Too Dirty to Swim

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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Big Day in Little Sydney

Videographer Keith Loutit is spending a year filming Sydney in tilt-shift time-lapses, such as this one of the city’s Mardi Gras celebration, above. What does Loutit’s reduction of urban life to miniature tell us about the city he’s working in? And what does tilt-shift photography say about humanity and its built environments? Is it speaking to the individual’s subjection to a grander design? Or does a format that makes people, vehicles, and cities look like models mean to say something about the artificiality of society, about the constructed nature of culture?

Most of Loutit’s videos focus the city’s primary public spaces, its harbor and its beaches. Yet his Little Sydneysiders are no more subsumed to the grandiosity of nature than they are lost in the crowd of the urban carnival. Rather, their lives revolve around a harbor and ocean that have been more or less tamed and harnessed by the city around them – relatively harmless even in the most extreme circumstances, as this dramatic rescue video illustrates. Below is a montage of a busy day in Sydney Harbor, as crisscrossed by boats, ships, and ferries as any square in New York or London is by pedestrians and cars. Appearing like playspaces for tiny toys, Sydney’s watched and controlled public realms appear to be just what Loutit titles them: “bathtubs”.

Darkness Falls

South Bay Beach, near Repulse Bay, at 7:30pm

Montreal’s Missing Beaches

Beach in Cartierville, on the Rivière des Prairies, around 1910

Nathalie Collard has a column in today’s La Presse lamenting the lack of access Montrealers have to their waterways. “Les Montréalais habitent une île, mais n’ont pratiquement pas accès à l’eau. C’est aberrant,” she writes. It’s true: despite being surrounded by water, including a variety of lakes, basins, channels, rapids and one of North America’s great rivers, Montreal is one of the least water-accessible cities I know. Whatever local instinct we once had to head to the water has been quashed by pollution, industry and highways.

Things are changing, of course. The re-opening of the Lachine Canal has done a lot to reinvigorate the area around it, even if its success as an functioning waterway is limited (the number have boaters on the canal has declined every year since 2001). The demolition of the Bonaventure Expressway, which will start next year, has the potential to transform the neglected Peel Basin into a real gathering place for Montrealers. And, despite all of the waterfront that is rendered accessible in the central part of the city, there are still plenty of gorgeous river- and lakeside parks in more outlying parts of the city, not to mention St. Helen’s Island.

But what really gets to me is the lack of beaches in Montreal. Before World War II, there were more than 20 across the island; now there are just two, one at Cap St-Jacques on the West Island and the other on Notre-Dame. (The latter, which has an entrance fee of $7, fronts an artificial lagoon.) The water in most parts of the St. Lawrence is actually clean enough to swim in without danger — surfers do it all the time at the standing wave behind Habitat ’67 — and I think that Montrealers would feel far more of a connection to their city’s waterways if only they were allowed to swim in them.

I think it’s time to recreate some of Montreal’s old beaches. Last year, when I wandered around Pointe Claire Village on the West Island, I came across a pleasant natural beach right next to a large waterfront park. It was fenced off. Why not open it up to the public? I admit I’m pretty ignorant of the ecological implications of turning it into a recreational beach, which would involve adding sand or fine gravel to the shoreline, but there must be some way to make it more accessible. Same goes for some of the parks along the Back River, many of which meet the water with concrete walls and fences.

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Sunset at English Bay

Every clear summer evening, as the sun starts to slide below the horizon, masking the mountains near Howe Sound in hazy layers of blue and purple, thousands of people flock to English Bay. The sunset, spectacular as it may be, is just a backdrop to their conversations, their laughter, their whispers and kisses.

Each evening, then, as a sunny day fades into a brisk Pacific night, the beach at English Bay, flanked by restaurants and apartment towers, becomes the greatest kind of urban living room. Here, in a way that seems befitting of the West Coast, the granite paving stones of a piazza are exchanged for sand, well-worn grass and an asphalt promenade.

Beaches Are For Cities!

Barceloneta, Barcelona, Spain

Malecon, Havana, Cuba

hTo, Toronto, Canada