January 11th, 2010
Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels has always been a wealthy place, home first to the city’s Western elite and then to a broader mix of local and expatriate professionals. Its narrow, hilly streets were once lined by mansions, rowhouses and lowrise apartment blocks, but that has gradually given way to a kind of vertical suburbia where giant apartment towers sit atop parking garage podiums that face the street with blank walls and driveways.
These hostile, extravagant constructions make the Mid-Levels an unpleasant place to walk around, despite the overall quietude and the abundance of greenery. But there are still a handful of streets that retain a pleasant human scale. These are streets where pedestrians are greeted by big windows, balconies, rough-cut stone walls and small shops, not over-the-top fountains, hotel-style lobbies and massive driveways.
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December 27th, 2009
This is a collection of pictures of the last night the infamous Tongren Road strip was open and functioning.
Tongren Road runs right through the commercial heart of the Jing An district in Shanghai. A very small strip (like half a block) of this road was one of many red light districts that are scattered through out the city. What made this particular strip interesting was that it existed for a quite a long time surrounded by some of the most expensive real estate in Shanghai and China. On December 17th, this notorious half a block was shut down in preparation for the Expo in 2010. There is also a billion-plus-dollar development going up right across the street. The new Kerry Center office complex and a Shangri-La hotel will open in two years.
While I don’t normally frequent areas like these, I have to admit that I always had a soft spot for Tongren Road. It was its long-lasting grittiness and sleaziness amongst the immediate gentrification that surrounded it that made it unique.
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December 23rd, 2009
Air conditioning is a bit like a narcotic: once it claws its way into your life, you begin changing yourself to accommodate its demands. When air conditioning became common in Hong Kong, it changed the very fabric of the city, shrinking windows, destroying verandahs, turning streets into dripping, humming corridors meant to serve the useful space, which moved indoors.
In the past, Hong Kong architecture emphasized shade and ventilation, with arcaded sidewalks and large windows. The new architecture of A/C turned its back on these traditional ways of coping with a hot climate, eventually creating a city that struggles with a severe urban heat island effect and wall-like buildings that block the wind and trap pollution.
December 23rd, 2009
Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”
“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”
Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”
She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.
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December 3rd, 2009
Photo by David Bellis
The best way to learn about a city is to simply wander the streets: eventually, something will catch your attention, like an odd-looking cornice or the way a road curves, and you’ll ask yourself why it is the way it is. Idle curiosity is how I began my research on Montreal’s street signs and Hong Kong’s rooftops. For David Bellis, who runs the Hong Kong heritage website Gwulo, it was an architectural flourish that led him to wonder about three streets in Causeway Bay.
Halfway between the shopping hubs of Times Square and Sogo, on the corner of Yun Ping and Lan Fong roads, is a smart-looking, vaguely Art Deco building that serves as a hotel. At first glance, it seems to be an older postwar building that was recently restored; its architecture is in the same half-Deco, half-Modernist style that was popular here in the 1950s. This structure, though, is particularly sleek and not as utilitarian as most, with clean lines that curve gracefully around the building’s corner edge.
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October 2nd, 2009
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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July 9th, 2009
Ding uk in Kam Sham Village, Tai Po
I never thought I’d find a triplex in Hong Kong but it turns out there’s thousands of them. While Montreal’s triplexes were mostly built in the early twentieth century, though, the ones in Hong Kong, known in Cantonese as ding uk, are actually fairly recent.
While ding uk are usually called “village houses” in English, this isn’t a very precise translation: the term actually means “sons’ houses.” They’re a product of a 1972 law that allows the first-born sons of Hong Kong’s indigenous families to build a house in their ancestral villages without having to pay for the land. There are hundreds of such villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong, which were granted special rights, including a certain degree of self-determination, when they were annexed by Britain in 1898. In order to regulate the demand for housing, the law limited ding uk to three stories in height and 2,100 square feet of floor space.
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June 1st, 2009
Urbanphoto is pleased to welcome our newest contributor, Sam Massie, who is en route to Kunming, Yunnan, where he is starting a new job with a Chinese NGO. He will blog about urban spaces in southwestern China.
Ever wonder where chandeliers come from? The answer is usually Guzhen, a city in China’s Guangdong province that produces 60% of the world’s light fixtures. It isn’t just one or two factories; the entire city is devoted to the sale and production of lights. Riding a taxi through Guzhen, I passed block after block of eight-story buildings, the storefronts of which glittered with the light of thousand of lamps and chandeliers. As we pulled onto the highway, my cab driver remarked lazily: “This area was farmland three years ago.” I him whether he preferred living in the old countryside or the new city. He replied that he preferred living in the countryside because the air was less polluted, and because it was quieter.
The cab driver could have been talking about any town in the Pearl River Delta. This region, which includes the cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, contains hundreds of specialized factory towns that churn out manufactured goods for export to every continent. Rapid growth in exports has in turn led to similarly rapid urbanization. But “urban growth” or “sprawl” don’t even begin to describe the scale of the change underway — it’s as though the entire Pearl River region is going from countryside to big-city overnight.
For the whole duration of the three-hour cab ride, I saw waves of pink-tile houses erupting from rice paddies, the concrete posts of unfinished highway overpasses looming overhead, and forests of 30-story high-rises sprouting near every intersection. This phenomenon is best described as in-situ urbanization: it occurs without center or direction, with no visible line between city and countryside, and no urban center driving outward expansion. Every village is sprouting high rises.
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