Container gardening is the ultimate form of urban greening: space-efficient, low-maintenance and productive. People in Hong Kong have been doing it for generations.
Last summer, on a sunny but oppressively hot day, I found myself on the roof of a 1960s-era highrise apartment building in Kwun Tong. Among the lines of billowing laundry were several clusters of potted plants maintained by the building’s residents. Though most were decorative plants, there were some fruits being grown, including kumquats and tomatoes. Anyone interested in growing their own herbs or vegetables could have easily done so.
Unfortunately, informal rooftop gardens like this are set to become a rarity. The Kwun Tong building on which these photos were taken will be demolished next year for a massive redevelopment project. Newer buildings tend to have smaller roof areas and no room for plants. My building has just two flats per floor, for example, which makes for a very small roof, most of which taken up by stairwell entrances and an elevator machine room. Even if I tried to start a container garden up there, it’d probably be cleared away by the building management.
The government is pushing developers to include green features in new developments. The public housing authority, whose buildings house more than a third of Hong Kong’s population, is experimenting with green roofs, vertical greening and community gardens. But there’s something to be said for giving people a bit of empty space and letting them do what they want with it.
In the most remote corner of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale’s West Kowloon site, three architects, Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone and Daniel Patzold, are digging up Hong Kong’s heritage from virgin land. The concept: it’s several centuries into the future and an old street market has been discovered, leading to an archaeological race to save what remains of it.
Artifacts from the Central street market are scattered around the dig, including an old green market booth the team brought in from Gutzlaff Street. It now sits incongruously in an open plain with the giant glass-and-stall wall of the just-built International Commerce Centre rising incongruously behind it.
“When something like this is in the market, you don’t notice because it’s a shitty old thing, but when you move it here, you start seeing all of the details. There’s a lot of stories here,” says Johnstone. “If we found an old market 350 years in the future, we would want to preserve and protect the ruins. Why not today for the markets that still exist?”
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.
There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.
On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.
“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”
For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.
Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.
When the curators of the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale began assembling exhibits for the urbanism and architecture showcase, they decided to focus on the theme of sustainability. It turns out that most of the artists, architects and designers who answered their call for submissions had the same idea.
“It’s almost a zeitgeist,” says Eric Schuldenfrei, one of the biennale’s four curators. “When you ask people for new work, the dialogue with nature is very strong. It might be subtle, but if you look for it, there is that element in almost every project in the biennale. It’s curated to an extent, but it’s also what everyone was already working on.”
Sustainability might be a buzzword, but the philosophy behind it goes far beyond a bit of greenery here and there. A scan of the biennale’s lengthy roster of exhibitions, installations, lectures and events shows a preoccupation with the question of how to reduce Hong Kong’s impact on the environment and bring city-dwellers back into contact with nature.
Last week, I posted a video by Thomas Lee in which he asked passers-by on Sai Yeung Choi Street where they would go if they could open a door to anywhere. Now he’s back with another great video, this time a (well-subtitled) Cantonese-language rap by MC Yan, whom you might remember as the founder of Radio Dada and one of the first Chinese rappers.
I helped produce this video (though I can’t claim much credit — after introducing him to MC Yan and participating in a brainstorming session, nearly all of the work was done by Thomas). What struck me from the beginning was how passionate MC Yan is about Hong Kong, despite the cynicism that defines his lyrics. He’s genuinely fascinated by this place, rooted to it not only by birth but by a desire to improve it, and the way he expresses that is through unrelenting criticism of Hong Kong’s government and leaders.
In the video, he takes us on a tour of three important parts of Hong Kong — Causeway Bay, Central and West Kowloon — drawing inspiration from the social, political and cultural geography of each.
Every evening, Sai Yeung Choi Street becomes a parade of shoppers, street performers and promoters that lasts until after midnight. There are few other places in the world where you come into such close proximity with so many people, but contact is fleeting: a bumped elbow, a wayward glance, a shared moment while watching a busker.
Videographer Thomas Lee exploited Sai Yeung Choi Street’s ephemeral nature in his video “A Door to Anywhere,” pulling aside people to ask them a simple question: “If you had a door that opened to anywhere at all, where would you go?” It’s a cute conceit taken from Doraemon, the Japanese anime, where the “dokodemo door” allows its characters to be instantly transported anywhere.
The answers that Lee gets are funny, surprising and poignant. For a few seconds, we get a glimpse of who these strangers are, before they wave goodbye and disappear back into the crowd.
The basement of a shopping mall is the last place you’d expect to find the stirrings of a revolution, but that’s exactly what is happening in a tiny studio on the bottom floor of Langham Place. For the past year, Radio Dada has been dishing up indie music and irreverent discussion about Hong Kong arts and culture. Not only is this volunteer-run operation Hong Kong’s only independent radio station, its internet-based approach finally breaks free of the shackles that bind Hong Kong’s airwaves.
“Radio Dada is an experiment on how to build a radio station in Hong Kong,” says rapper and graffiti writer MC Yan, who is also the station’s musical director. “People are surprised that we do it without any money. But it’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Hong Kong is full of self-censorship, it’s way worse than in China. People here have no guts and no balls. We’re here to fix that.”
Despite Hong Kong’s reputation as a bastion of free expression, it’s actually illegal to run an independent radio station here. Only three radio stations — two of them commercial, one run by the government — are allowed to broadcast over the air. Nobody else has succeeded in getting a broadcast licence. In 2005, when a band of pro-democracy activists started a pirate station, Citizens’ Radio, that broadcast weekly political commentary, their offices were raided by police.
Tourists usually head to the Avenue of Stars to get their fix of Hong Kong’s famous skyline. But there’s an infinitely more rewarding alternative just a couple of kilometres to the west. Well off the sightseer’s radar and overlooked even by most locals, the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade offers an incomparable 360-degree view of Victoria Harbour and the dizzying skyscrapers that flank it.
In a way, West Kowloon is the culmination of a hundred-year trend in Hong Kong history: land reclamation. Much of the modern-day city is built on soil dumped into the harbour, but none of the past landfill projects compare to the vast scale of West Kowloon, which replaced several square kilometres of water with highways, railroads, malls, offices and apartment towers. There’s so much new land, in fact, that people are still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. That’s why, for the time being at least, a large swath of it remains vacant and undeveloped.
Nature has already made its introduction and much of the vacant land is covered in small trees and craggy brush. With waves crashing on one side and the hissing of cicadas on the other, the West Kowloon waterfront feels like an obscure bit of country shoreline — except for that panoramic view of Hong Kong’s glossy skyline, of course.
Although it often seems like Hong Kong is in the process of being converted into a series of lookalike indoor shopping malls, its street markets are still the place to go for the freshest veggies, cheapest phones and oddest trinkets. These are four of the most interesting market stalls I’ve come across.
Found objects, Upper Lascar Row, Sheung Wan
Most of the hawkers on Cat Street specialize in faux antiques, chinoiseries and kitschy Mao paraphernalia, but ‘Uncle Szeto’ sells something else: a chance to snoop through the lives of others.
Mountains of old letters, family photos, postcards and miscellanea somehow make their way into the hands of this circumspect street vendor, who has been running his stall for more than 20 years. He’s wary of giving away the secrets to his collection of personal memorabilia.
“They’re mostly old photos from families. But don’t bother asking where they’re from. I can’t give away my sources,” he says, nodding towards the neighboring stalls, some of which also sell found objects.
This new ad for the recent extension of the Hong Kong MTR’s West Rail Line, which now runs from Tsim Sha Tsui all the way out to Tuen Mun, via the farm fields, housing estates and wife cakes of Yuen Long, straddles a line between parallel traditions of public transit advertising: the earnest and the bizarre.
While it does a pretty straightforward job of depicting all of the places linked by the West Rail Line, the ad uses multi-coloured rings as a visual and narrative device to link everything together. I’m not really sure what the rings are meant to represent (stations? transfer points?) but it’s a cute concept.
Montreal Apartments