Bangkok. Photo by Jonathan Newman
Chicago. Photo by GXM
Tokyo. Photo by Corentin Walravens
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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.
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
Railroad viaduct, Griffintown
Highway 40, Villeray
If there’s a city that proves the lengths to which a government is willing to go for cars, it’s Hong Kong. Fewer than one in five people here actually own a car; most of the traffic is made up of trucks or some form of public transportation. It’s one of the less congested cities in Asia. Yet the government insists on building new roads at the expense of the city’s environment and quality of life.
The Central Kowloon Route is one of the most recent examples. Current plans call for an expressway to be tunnelled across the Kowloon peninsula, from a highway near the old Kai Tak Airport in the east to the West Kowloon expressway in the west. This in and of itself could be a good thing, since it has the potential to remove cross-town truck and bus traffic from noisy and polluted surface streets. But instead of using the new tunnel as a way to reduce the impact of traffic on surface roads, the government is increasing it. Along with the construction of the tunnel, the Central Kowloon Route will involve the widening of the existing Gascoigne Road flyover that runs through one of the city’s most densely-populated neighbourhoods.
The widening of the flyover is pretty much a done deal, unfortunately, so the question now is how to mitigate its impact. Sound barriers have recently come into vogue here, but they often create visual pollution every bit as nasty as noise, and of course they don’t do anything for the more serious problem of air pollution. To deal with this dilemma, an architectural competition was held for the design of the sound barriers along the rebuilt Gascoigne Road flyover, and the winners, a team of four recent architecture school graduates, found a solution that is both obvious and ingenious: cover the road in greenery. The flyover would be enclosed in a double-layered shell of glass modules that could support vegetation, which would then grow up and over the surface of the shell. The architects pointed to wall trees as their inspiration.
Engineers still need to determine if the winning proposal is technically feasible. If it is, and the government chooses to integrate it into the final design of the widened flyover, it could be a way to deal with the future highways that the government insists on building and the people are mostly powerless to stop.
Trafficopter, a 1972 National Film Board documentary by Barrie Howells, isn’t especially insightful, but it is certainly stylish. Following the traffic reporter for a Montreal radio station as he soars above the morning rush hour in a small helicopter, it gazes down at a miniature city caught up in the interminable grind of daily commerce.
There are plenty of captivating images here, both of Montreal from above and some long-vanished places like the Montreal Star‘s newsroom. The last few minutes of the film, which depict the city smoking and steaming in the frigid air of a winter morning, are by far the most memorable. There’s also an interesting bit where the reporter mentions that the pollution he encounters flying over the city every day led to an infection in one of his lungs — a reminder that Montreal is probably a lot cleaner now than it was for most of its industrial history.
A nice companion piece to Trafficopter is this short clip from Luc Bourdon’s La mémoire des anges. Here, we see the Turcot Interchange shortly after its construction, images of its soaring concrete spans set to audio of mayor Jean Drapeau musing, in a very 1960s way, about the need for traffic to circulate freely.
Huanhe Road next to one of Taipei’s riverside expressways
Photo by Karen Spencer
“What drew me to the Turcot originally was the size of it,” recalls Ken McLaughlin. The Verdun artist maintains Walking Turcot Yards, a blog dedicated to the area around the giant interchange at the junction of highways 15 and 20, built in 1966 in a feat of Modernist ambition. “It’s pretty incredible to look up there and see it all. It’s very sculptural, all the lines and shapes, very smooth,” he says.
Next year, though, the area around the Turcot Yards will be dramatically reshaped by a $1.5-billion reconstruction project. The grandiose swoop and curves of the city’s most iconic interchange will make way for an entirely new structure, its layers of flyovers and elevated highways replaced by a new structure that hugs the ground, surrounded by berms and embankments. Construction is expected to last from 2009 to 2015.
Quebec’s transport minister promises that the new interchange will be safer for motorists and quieter for nearby residents. But people in both NDG and St-Henri are worried that the impact on their neighbourhoods will be severe.
In western St-Henri, residents of the Village des Tanneries, who live right next to the interchange, fear nothing less than the complete disruption of their lives. Jody Negley, leader of the Citizens’ Committee of the Village des Tanneries, worries about having to live with six years of constant construction.
“Years of community effort on the part of residents and non-profit groups to improve quality of life in the area will be for naught,” she says. “Nobody will want to spend any time outside as the noise levels will be deafening, the air quality will be toxic, the newly built community gardens will be covered in grime [and] it will be unsafe for children to play outside, given the traffic and pollution.”
Restoring a six-kilometre stream that has been covered by an expressway for over fifty years is not an easy task. The job is even more difficult when the stream happens to meander through one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities. The Cheonggyecheon, or the Cheonggye Stream restoration project is without question the most ambitious urban renewal scheme to have ever been undertaken in the history of Seoul.
The aims of the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, completed in 2005, were first, to rectify a severe public safety problem caused by an expressway that threatened to collapse at any moment; second, to address Seoul’s deteriorating environmental conditions by creating an environmentally friendly place in the centre of the city; third, to pay tribute the history of the 600 year old Korean capital; and fourth, to spur redevelopment in the surrounding neighbourhoods, which at that time lagged behind other neighbourhoods in the central city.
To fully appreciate the significance of the Cheonggyecheon project to the Korean people it is necessary to know a little bit about Korean history, particularly as it relates to Seoul. The Choson Dynasty, led by Emperor Taiju, chose the land on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon near its intersection with the mighty Han River as Korea’s capital in 1392. Monk Muhak, on behalf of Taiju, selected the site after an extensive two-year search for a location that satisfied the principles of feng shui. According to Muhak, the site possessed powerful Earth energy that was enhanced by a prominent mountain directly to the north, another to the south and two other mountains situated to the east and west of the site.
Toronto is going through a municipal election right now and the Spacing Votes blog is doing an admirable job of covering it. One of the issues is the Gardiner Expressway, a much-maligned elevated highway that runs along the Toronto waterfront whose fate has been in question for years. Most simply want to tear it down, but a recent report advocates a “transformation” option: embrace the Gardiner by reclaiming all of the underused space beneath it for community, recreational and commercial use.
