November 19th, 2011
This is the last in a series of three posts about Hong Kong’s waterfront public spaces. Read the first one here and the second here.
The promenade that runs for 850 metres along the Central ferry piers is one of the best public spaces in Hong Kong. I suspect this partly by accident. In the late 1990s, land reclamation for the airport railway and Tung Chung MTR line pushed the Central waterfront more than 300 metres outwards, so the six ferry piers that serve Hong Kong’s outlying islands were relocated. In 2006, they were joined by two new Star Ferry piers and two public piers used by pleasure craft and other small boats. A promenade was created to link each of the piers, which are in turn linked to the rest of Central by a footbridge network.
At first glance, the promenade is pretty ordinary; it makes extensive use of the same chintzy pink tiles that are found everywhere in Hong Kong. (I really, really wish the government would invest in some high-quality paving stones. With nearly HK$600 billion in reserves, it could surely afford some nice granite, no?) But there are several small touches that make the space more functional and more comfortable than other government-designed parks and plazas.
First is the provision of two parallel pathways. One runs along the water and is lined by benches, ledges and steps where people sit while they are waiting for their ferry. The second is covered and well-lit — a kind of expressway for people rushing to catch their ferries. The two are separated by steps and planters with curvy edges that create some interesting nooks in which to sit. The planters are filled with shrubs and fast-growing banyan trees that provide plenty of shade. The multiple levels and passages give the promenade a nuanced feel that isn’t found in many other public spaces in Hong Kong.
Those are the bones of the space; they’re ugly but they work well. The flesh and blood comes from the constant flow of ferry passengers, who are joined by joggers, fishermen, cyclists and truant schoolchildren. Most of the piers contain independently-owned shops selling snacks and drinks. (There’s even a bar stall selling craft beer, spirits and wine, which brings in people like myself who don’t need to use the ferries.) In the evening, there are always plenty of people sitting around, drinking beer, snacking and fishing. There are lots of couples, too — this is the only place in otherwise reserved Hong Kong where I always see public displays of affection.
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November 17th, 2011
For a city defined by its harbour, Hong Kong has done a remarkable job of blocking people off from it. Highways, private development, cargo yards and storage depots take up more than 60 percent of Victoria Harbour’s shorelines. The rest of the harbourfront is a higgledy-piggledy network of disjointed promenades, some better than others.
Luckily, a new Harbourfront Commission has been tasked with restoring the harbourfront as a public place. In addition to drawing plans for public promenades beneath the East Island Corridor, an elevated highway built on pylons off the eastern shore of Hong Kong Island, and across the harbour at the former Kai Tak Airport, the commission vets ideas on what to do with all the new public space that will be created. Some proposals (a 16-kilometre cycleway) are better than others (a giant Ferris wheel built by the same company as the London Eye). There is now talk about the creation of a Harbourfront Authority that would help implement these ambitious plans by pushing aside the government departments whose narrow interests and love for bureaucracy would stand in the way of any coherent development.
Even with a para-governmental authority in charge of the harbourfront, though, any new development would need to respond to the existing standards and practices of waterfront urban design. Hong Kong has a number of different stretches of publicly-accessible waterfronts, each built at different times and in different circumstances. I think it’s worth looking at some of these to see where they fail and where they succeed: Tsim Sha Tsui, Kwun Tong, Ma On Shan, the Central ferry piers and the Cheung Chau Praya.
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November 26th, 2009
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November 26th, 2009
We didn’t know what to expect. Faced with the novelty of an open Saturday night, my girlfriend Laine and I decided to go somewhere random. Why not Cheung Chau? We’d always enjoyed visiting the island during the day, when its bicycles, beaches and palates of drying fish are a rebuke to the city’s uptight rush. It might be just as fun at night, we reasoned.
So we headed to the Central Ferry Piers where we stocked up on good beer — a Paulaner Dunkelweizen, a Brooklyn Lager and a Yebisu, for the record — and caught the 9:30pm “Ordinary Ferry” at Pier 5. In this case, “ordinary” means you’ll get exactly what you’d expect from a ferry: a real boat that sloshes back and forth in the water, with a spot at the rear where you can sit outdoors and feel the wind in your hair. It takes 15 minutes longer than the hermetically-sealed icebox “Fast Ferry,” but it also costs half as much and is twice as much fun.
We arrived at the island a bit after 10pm. The lights on the harbourfront promenade twinkled like somebody’s forgotten Christmas decorations. As we disembarked the ferry and left the pier, I noticed that most of seafood restaurants along the Praya were already winding down for the night, but Laine pointed out something far more exciting: street food.
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August 11th, 2009
Cheung Chau is one of my favourite bits of Hong Kong, but only recently have I strayed outside of its warren of small streets between the beach and harbour and up into the hill just south of town. Earlier this summer, after climbing up a long set of stairs at the end of a narrow lane, I was surprised to come across a long, winding footpath, lined by comfortable-looking houses with large balconies and lush gardens, called the Peak Road. It seemed like a deliberate reference the Hong Kong’s more famous Victoria Peak, the one where houses sell for tens of millions of dollars and the colonial elite built an exclusive hideaway for itself in the days of British control.
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July 6th, 2009
Cheung Chau, Hong Kong
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March 20th, 2009
These doors on the island of Cheung Chau lead to village house apartments. They’re pretty unremarkable at first glance, but if you look at them a second time you begin to realize that they are perfect representations of residential doorways in Hong Kong.
Shoes are clustered around the door, a testament to the cramped conditions in typical Hong Kong home (nobody wants to waste precious living room space on a shoe rack). Nearby are the altars used for burning incense in honour of family ancestors. Special New Year emblems are placed around entranceways for the two weeks after the Lunar New Year. There’s some laundry drying outside next to assorted junk. Finally, there are the gates: just about every apartment door in Hong Kong is protected by a metal gate, which is odd considering that the city doesn’t have a particularly high crime rate. The gates have become such a staple that they are even available in glitzy decorative versions. I’ve never really understood those — if your apartment has a fancy metal gate, doesn’t that just advertise to potential thieves that there’s something worth stealing inside?
Normally all of the things I’ve described above would be found in apartment building corridors, not in the street. But that blend of domestic and public life is of the things I like about Cheung Chau and Hong Kong’s other islands. It’s indicative of a more casual, relaxed lifestyle than in the urban areas. After all, just look at the shoes piled up in front of the doors above: flip flops.
August 18th, 2008
One of my favourite things about Hong Kong is its geographic diversity. In an area of just 1,100 square kilometres — about twice the size of Montreal Island — you’ll find astoundingly dense urban areas, rural villages, country parks, mountains and dozens of islands. The islands are particularly noteworthy. Traditionally home to fishing villages, many are now laid-back escapes from the stress of city life, car-free and connected to the rest of the world only by ferries and the damp sea breeze.
Earlier this year, when I was last in Hong Kong, my girlfriend and I caught a late-afternoon ferry to Cheung Chau, a small but densely-populated island. Its name means “Long Island” in Cantonese and, on a map, you can spot it by its barbell-like shape: two chunky and misshapen pieces of land linked by a narrow isthmus. The ferry from Central, which takes about 30 minutes, brings you right to the heart of the isthmus, on which the bulk of Cheung Chau’s population lives. On one side is a busy fishing harbour; on the other, a sandy beach.
The first thing you notice about Cheung Chau is the lack of cars. The island has been inhabited by centuries and most of its development has taken the form of tightly-packed buildings, few of them taller than three stories, set along narrow, winding streets. Pedestrians and bicycles rule the island; the only motorized vehicles are little gas-powered trucks used by the fishing industry and tiny electric police cars, fire trucks and ambulances. Coming from central Hong Kong, where bikes are used only by deliverymen, it’s a pleasant surprise to find a community where they form an essential part of daily life. Hundreds of bikes are parked all along the waterfront promenade, and nobody bothers locking them, presumably because there’s nowhere a thief could take them; anyone caught surreptitiously loading bikes onto a boat would probably be viewed with suspicion, to say the least.
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