Kuala Lumpur is a city that settles into its streets like a comfortable pair of jeans. Hawker stalls and coffee shops spread out on the pavement, where a vast range of people — old, young, Indian, Malay, Chinese, immigrant — eat delicious food on folding tables and bright plastic stools.
But the irony is that, despite this vibrant, informal streetlife, Kuala Lumpur is a resolutely suburban place. Its neighbourhoods sprawl for miles, connected only tenuously by sidewalks and public transit. Without a car, the Klang Valley, as the whole metropolitan region is known, can be a very alienating place.
We didn’t have a car when we visited KL last September, but we did make an effort to venture out beyond the small city centre and into the suburbs beyond. One day, we took the train out to Petaling Jaya, a large suburb just west of the city proper, where we walked and took taxis to get a sense of what everyday life in the Malaysian capital is like.
It turns out Hong Kong has got nothing on Guangzhou. In that city’s ancient Liwan District, where leafy, winding streets are lined by family-run wholesale businesses, just about every shop has a jumble of tables and chairs outside. They’re used for meals, boisterous card games and, in the middle of the afternoon, a kind of furtive siesta. (Unlike in southern Europe, most businesses in southeastern Asia don’t close in the afternoon — workers just sleep on the job.)
There’s a remarkable variety of furniture found in the streets. Disassembled sofas are common, along with beat-up lounge chairs and plain dining room chairs. But there are also some beautiful wicker recliners and elegant wooden chairs. After all, when you spend your days sitting the street, you’d better do it with style.
In 1999, American biologist J. Michael Fay set out on a project to map and survey the vegetation of Africa’s entire Congo River basin. Heavily promoted by National Geographic as “The Megatransect,” Fay’s feat involved 455 days of walking across 3,200 miles of largely untamed territory. Biologists had actually been using the term “transect” to describe such surveys since the late 19th century, but Fay’s epic-scale journey brought it widespread public recognition. In 2004 and 2005, he and Geographic extended the brand by conducting a “Megaflyover” of Africa, taking photos every 20 seconds during a 60,000 mile plus journey in a small bush plane.
Legendary as the natural surveys of explorer-biologists like Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt are, expeditions like theirs — and Fay’s — are increasingly rare now that most of “the field” has been crossed and recrossed. Geographers have turned their attention toward changes, rather than gaps, in maps of the earth’s surface — particularly those with less than natural causes. So it’s unsurprising that they have become fixated on the sites of the most intense human population growth and activity — cities. By 2008, urban centers contained, for the first time, over half the world’s people.
Light from a new fashion boutique floods an alley
near Blake Garden, Hong Kong
Alan Lo Yeung-kit is an unlikely critic of urban renewal. Three of his successful restaurants — Classified, Press Room and The Pawn — are located in Urban Renewal Authority projects in Sheung Wan and Wan Chai.
Critics have accused his businesses of taking part in the kind of URA-style renewal that is destroying the character of Hong Kong’s old neighbourhoods. But Lo is no fan of bulldozer redevelopment. “Our whole approach to urban renewal needs to be rethought,” he said.
Lo said he has come up with an alternative model for urban renewal, one that is both profitable and preservation-based. Last year, he and partner Darrin Woo founded a new design and development firm, Blake’s, that was inspired by the old neighbourhood around Blake Garden in Sheung Wan. The firm’s first project took a mid-century tong lau at 226 Hollywood Road and converted it into four luxury apartments. The units sold out soon after they went on sale in November, fetching more than HK$25 million apiece.
“It’s about getting out of the box-standard big-developer approach and making something that fits the neighbourhood,” says Lo. “The vision is to rethink an old, slightly sleepy neighbourhood with respect for what has been in the district for a long time, and without having to knock things down.”
Earlier this month I found myself in Macau for an afternoon, waiting for my girlfriend to pick up her Macau identity card from a local government office. I wandered up to the small streets just below the Fortaleza do Monte, an old military fort, and happened across a trio of terraces lined by mid-twentieth-century buildings. Each row of buildings was identical, but the presence of their inhabitants was seen in the façade of every individual apartment.
Sometime in the late tenth century, a Sung Dynasty bureaucrat named Tang Hon-fat left his hometown of Pak Sha Village in Jiangxi province atook a trip south, to the coast of Guangdong. When he passed through the lush valley now known as Kam Tin, he was so taken by its natural beauty and the friendliness of its peasant inhabitants, he decided to move his entire family there. They arrived, ancestral bones in tow, in 973.
If Tang were to pass through Kam Tin in 2011, he might be less impressed. The mountains are still as beautiful as always, but the banana trees and farm fields of the valley have mostly given way to a haphazard collecton of houses, shacks and junkyards, none built with particular care or concern for the surrounding landscape. And if the people of Kam Tin were once known for their generosity, they lost it at some point during the millenium of pirate raids, dynastic upheaval and British annexation that has passed since Tang Hon-fat’s arrival. Visitors to Kam Tin’s ancient walled villages are more likely to encounter a cranky old woman demanding an entry fee than they are to be greeted with smiles.
Still, Kam Tin is one of Hong Kong’s most intriguing places, both for its centuries of history (documented with flourish by Sung Hok-pang in a 1973 paper for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) and its more recent development. In 1950, the Royal Air Force opened a base here, which housed a number of military families until the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. (It was also used as a detention camp for Vietnamese refugees from the 1970s to 1992.) Today, the base is mostly disused, run by a single unit of the Peoples’ Liberation Army, whose soldiers are not allowed to leave the base. But the airfield still makes its presence felt through the large community of ex-Gurkhas — the Nepalese and Indian who formed their own regiments in the British Army — who have remained in the area.
When I visited Rome in 2006, I stayed in an apartment next to Trastevere Station, a twenty-minute tram ride from the city’s historic centre. After a week in London, where everything is well-ordered, clearly marked and invested with a sense of purpose, Rome’s grimy atmosphere of barely-contained chaos greeted me with a shock. Thinking back, though, I appreciate the city’s idiosyncrasy, its relative lack of chain stories and — at least in the outer parts of Trastevere — its complete lack of pretension.
I’ve been looking through my old photos lately and discovered many that have never seen the light of Flickr. These were all taken on cold days in January and February 2005. There’s something about the crisp blue skies that makes me yearn for the sharp, dry chill of winter air, but only for about five minutes.
I’m a big fan of street art for all sorts of reasons: it is a sign of dynamic urban life, it is a jab in the face of authority, it makes my walks through the city more interesting. But street art, like all forms of art, can get stuck in a rut. When it takes itself too seriously I begin to lose interest.
That is why I am so fascinated by what might be termed outsider street art. This is the work creates by people who don’t see themselves as artists and who don’t necessarily conceive of what they’re doing as art. Their work is a means to an end, but because that end is often opaque, the message is seductively ambiguous. Two prime examples of this are the King of Kowloon and the Plumber King.
Last weekend, I came across another example while walking through King’s Park, a hilly green area not far from my apartment. On the side of a quiet road leading up to an underground reservoir, somebody had scrawled dozens of words, phrases and names on a white retaining wall. Some referred to history, others to literature, still others to common sayings. What they had to do with one another wasn’t clear.
Strip clubs often have fabulously kitschy neon signs. In Hong Kong, all of those signs are conveniently located in one place: Lockhart Road, scene of the city’s most debauched nightlife. Strip clubs, hooker bars and other places of ill repute have existed here since World War II, when American soldiers landed at the nearby Wan Chai docks for rest, relaxation and possibly venereal disease. This is the part of town that inspired that paragon of Far East film clichés, The World of Suzie Wong.
Lockhart Road is as salacious as it ever was, though Suzie Wong has given way to women of Filipino and Thai origin. Clubs advertise cheap drinks in the hope of luring men who are then expected to spend lavishly on the women inside.
As the patronage of these bars skews white, male and anglophone, this is one of the few parts of Hong Kong where most neon signs are in English rather than Chinese. Though they blink frenetically and feature amusing names (Crazy Horse, Show Biz and so on), they aren’t quite as outlandish as you would expect, given the nature of the neighbourhood. (This is not Montreal after all; animated neon lap dances probably wouldn’t fly here. Hong Kong is permissive, but in a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of way.)
I’ve always liked honey. Who doesn’t? But I never really understood it. Back in Canada, when I ventured into the supermarket and gazed at the various kinds of honey for sale, I was mystified by the clover honey and blueberry honey, which I bought and tried, only to find it had the same musty sweetness as any kind of honey.
That changed last month when I visited the Wing Wo Bee Farm in Hong Kong. To get there, my girlfriend Laine and I took the train to Shatin MTR station, trudged through the crowds heading to IKEA, and walked up the hilly paths that lead through the village of Pai Tau. After ten minutes, as houses gave way to thick woods, we found ourselves in front of a collection of wood boxes. Wind rustled through the leaves of the trees overhead. The warbly sound of a horn floated down from the monastery. I barely noticed the thousands of bees buzzing around.
We were greeted by the farm’s owner, Yip Ki-hok, a slight, ruddy-skinned man who spoke with the accent of his native Wai Yeung, a small town about 100 kilometres north of where we were standing. (Hong Kong, which is pronounced Heung Gong in standard Cantonese, came out as Hiong Gong when Yip spoke).
“These are Chinese bees — foreign bees need more space, they like big open fields, so they aren’t suitable for Hong Kong,” Yip said as he gestured towards the boxes, which each contain more than 10,000 bees. “They extract liquid from mountain trees. In the winter they go to ap geuk mok, these trees right above here. The flowers bloom after the winter solstice until mid-February.”
In the middle of winter, when you wake up, look out the window and see brilliant sunshine, it can mean only one thing: it’s really, really cold outside.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 16 hours agofrom web
