January 30th, 2012
It used to be routine: wake up, walk to the wet market and buy the day’s fresh ingredients for dinner. Markets have always been a part of Hong Kong life, but these days, they are losing ground to supermarkets, whose numbers have grown exponentially over the past two decades.
Chain supermarkets Wellcome and Park’n’Shop now control more than 70 percent of the grocery sector, while the number of independent grocery stores and wet market stalls has declined by more than half since 1996. Tofu merchant Cheung Ching-loi says business at his stall in Tai Yuen Market declined by 60 percent over the past decade.
Other market vendors tell a similar story: fewer customers, quieter markets. In the government’s 102 public markets, one out of every seven stalls is vacant. The vacancy rate is similar in markets run by the Housing Authority and The Link Reit, a publicly-traded corporation that bought 96 markets from the government in 2005.
The situation became so bad at some markets they were simply shut down. Before it closed last year, the government-run Mong Kok Market was more than 60 percent empty. Vendors placed the blame not only on changing consumption habits, but on the market environment: wet, dirty, cluttered and poorly-ventilated.
That was certainly the case at Tai Yuen, which is located near the heart of the Tai Wo shopping district in the suburban town of Tai Po. Thirty years after its construction in 1980, half its stalls stood empty. Customers were so sparse that merchants took the afternoon as an opportunity to nap. There was no natural light, little ventilation and no air conditioning. The roof leaked when it rained.
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January 21st, 2012
Oil Street. Photo by Eric To
This story was originally published in the November 2010 edition of Muse, the new-defunct review of Hong Kong arts and culture.
It was a hot night when I sat inside the cluttered studios of the pirate radio station FM 101, six floors up inside an industrial building in Kwun Tong. I was speaking to one of the station’s founders, a rock musician named Leung Wing-lai, when the doorbell rang. Leung excused himself to go open the door. Three people walked in, including Ah Kok Wong, a composer who has been working with Kwun Tong’s artists to lobby the government against a new policy that made it easier for the owners of industrial units to convert their space into offices or hotels.
Wong told me about an Arts Development Council survey that was meant to determine exactly how many artists, musicians and other creative people are making use of industrial space. Unfortunately, few artists received the survey, so Wong and several others had taken to distributing it themselves. “I have my own studio, a band room and a studio used by the radio station, and we didn’t get copies at any of these places,” he said. If not enough artists completed the survey, he told me, the government would have no clear picture of the thousands of creative people that work in low-rent, run-down industrial buildings, and its new industrial “revitalization” policy would lead to unchecked property speculation, pushing out a huge chunk of Hong Kong’s artists, musicians and cultural organizations.
Leung returned to his seat. We talked about FM 101, which focuses mainly on arts, culture and music and was set up to protest against regulations that make it nearly impossible for a non-profit, community-based radio station to get a broadcast licence. A recent crackdown on the station’s fundraising efforts has forced its volunteers to pay for its operating expenses out of their own pocket, which has only been possible because the studio’s rent is low. “Without this kind of space, where would we go?” he asked.
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December 27th, 2011
When Norman Foster won the international competition for the master plan of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong last spring, I was disappointed. I thought it was plug-and-play urbanism, a crowd-pleasing design that had too much in common with so many interchangeable urban neighbourhoods that have sprung up in the past 20 years.
Of course, there’s another argument to be made. While Foster doesn’t take any big risks, he gets the fundamentals right. On paper, his plan for West Kowloon is environmentally-sensitive, pedestrian-friendly, small-scale and full of greenery. Given that it is more than a cultural district — it will be home to thousands of residents, 16,000 workers, hundreds of retail outlets, 18 cultural venues and countless visitors — it’s possible to see West Kowloon as Hong Kong’s most ambitious experiment in urban planning since the creation of the New Towns in the 1970s, which laid the groundwork for decades of large-scale modernist tower block development. The cultural district is a significant and positive departure from that model.
I wanted to hear more about the plan from the architects who worked on it, so last summer, I paid a visit to Colin Ward, the amiable lead architect on Foster’s West Kowloon team. We spoke in a conference room with a view over Victoria Harbour, barges and ferries streaming through its waters like ducks in a lake.
Ward began the interview with a warning. “Exemplar cultural districts can be, if you’re not careful, terrible urban districts,” he said. He stressed the importance of what the Foster team calls the “19th venue” — the public realm. “Culture should be embedded in the city — wrapped in the city,” he says. “Two thirds of this brief is ‘city,’ the filler that goes in between the cultural venues.”
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December 24th, 2011
The aroma of wood smoke is not one of the things I expected to smell when I moved to a new apartment on the 35th floor, but there’s a rooftop barbecue restaurant just down the street from my building and the smell often floats upwards. When I sit on my balcony, I can watch little clumps of people around the fires, grilling fishballs and pork chops.
In Montreal, I always thought it was better to be close to the street. Why sequester yourself in a high-rise, buffeted by northern winds, when you could be close to neighbours and the street and your local dep, which is always well-stocked with beer? As much as I could appreciate a good view, being able to watch alley cats make their nightly inspections seemed somehow more important.
In too many parts of Hong Kong, though, proximity to the street does not confer many real pleasures. The traffic is noisier, the pollution more irritating, the sunlight so very fleeting. In the absence of a true convivial streetlife, life on a low floor is not a matter of engagement with your surroundings, just a feat of endurance.
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December 7th, 2011
Paddling Home, Kacey Wong, 2010
It’s not often that you get a chance to build a museum from scratch, but that is exactly what’s happening in Hong Kong, where a long-awaited museum of contemporary art and visual culture will soon take shape.
The 40,000-square-metre museum, known as M+ — short for Museum Plus — will be the centrepiece of the West Kowloon Cultural District, an ambitious US$3-billion project whose birth has been nothing if not troubled. After struggling for years to settle on a master development plan that pleased the public, the district lost its chief executive when British cultural administrator Graham Sheffield abruptly stepped down last winter. He blamed the resignation on ill health, but two months later, he landed a plum new job as Director Arts of the British Council. The attitude of the Hong Kong arts community towards the district can be charitably described as cynical.
Amidst all of this controversy, however, M+ seems like a beacon of hope, if only because of the talent involved in its development. The museum’s director, Swedish museologist Lars Nittve, led the creation of the Tate Modern in London. Lead curator Tobias Berger, originally from Germany, shook up the Hong Kong art scene when he became curator of the city’s premier alternative art space, Para/Site, in 2005. Later, he left for Seoul, where he worked as curator at the Nam June Paik Art Center.
Nittve and Berger’s ambitions for M+ are not modest. “Every epoch and almost every place has its museum,” says Nittve. “Asia is still waiting for a museum that reflects its time and place.” His goal, he says, is to create a museum that does for Hong Kong what MOMA did for New York in the 1940s and 50s, by placing it at the very centre of the cultural zeitgeist. “It totally rethought how you work with collections, how you work with exhibitions,” says Nittve. “People had never seen anything like it before. It was super radical. And it reflected a turning of the tables in the global balance.”
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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 8th, 2011
Bicycle dump. Photo by Dickson Lee for the SCMP
Sai Kung’s bicycle graveyard is back and bigger than ever. Last Wednesday, dozens of bikes were seen piled atop one another on a stretch of government land in the suburban Hong Kong district.
It’s a symptom of a wider problem – an acute shortage of bicycle parking spaces and a government that seems unwilling to address the problem.
According to the last Travel Characteristics Survey, which was conducted in 2002, 15.2 percent of people in Hong Kong had a bicycle available for use. The Cycling Alliance estimates there are more than a million bikes throughout the city.
But the government provides only 41,440 public bicycle parking spots. As a result, many cyclists leave their bicycles attached to roadside fences where they risk being seized by the government. After the bikes are confiscated, there is no way for their owners to reclaim them.
The Sai Kung dump is one of several used by the government to store bicycles confiscated from public areas. They are eventually auctioned in bulk to scrap metal dealers. Last year, after the South China Morning Post ran a story about the practice, the Sai Kung dump was cleared. But now it has returned, with even more bikes than before. Cyclists are outraged.
“This is first and foremost a failure of the government to provide better cycling facilities,” says Hong Kong Cycling Alliance member Martin Turner. “We have a crying need for more bicycle parking but the response of the government is that bikes are a litter problem to be cleared away.”
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October 12th, 2011
Construction of a new underground highway built on the last bit of land reclamation permitted in Victoria Harbour
If you are reading this somewhere in Hong Kong, odds are you’re sitting on a piece of land that was once a part of the sea. Since 1851, more than 60 square kilometres of land has been reclaimed from Hong Kong’s waterways, an area greater than Kowloon and nearly as large as the whole of Hong Kong Island.
Most of that reclamation took place along the shores of Victoria Harbour. That practice will come to an end next year with the completion of reclamation for the Central-Wan Chai Bypass, the last project permitted under the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, which was passed in 1996 after a rash of reclamation proposals left the public worried that Victoria Harbour would one day disappear under a mountain of landfill.
Land in Hong Kong remains scarce, however, and the government remains intent on keeping reclamation in its toolbox. “It is necessary to resume land production by reclamation of an appropriate scale outside the Victoria Harbour so as to provide land to sustain the social and economic development of Hong Kong in the long run,” said the Permanent Secretary for Development (Works), Wai Chi-sing, last May. The government is now conducting a study of possible reclamation sites. Public consultations will begin next month.
Though Hong Kong has been reclaiming land for the better part of two centuries, it is a markedly different city than it was a century or even a decade ago. These days, nearly every major infrastructure project meets with controversy. Opposition to major development projects is often fierce, as was the case with last year’s protests over the construction of the Express Rail to mainland China. In such a stormy atmosphere, is more land reclamation really feasible?
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September 22nd, 2011
Imagine it’s a beautiful autumn day in Hong Kong. The summer’s humidity has vanished and you’re out enjoying the fine weather, bicycling along Victoria Harbour. You pass the Star Ferry pier, the new government headquarters at Tamar, then Victoria Park, all the while gazing out at the jade green water.
That was the vision presented by a group of cycling advocates at the Harbourfront Commission on September 7th. The Hong Kong Cycling Alliance is urging the commission to include a 16-kilometre cycleway in its plans for a continuous public promenade along the shoreline of Victoria Harbour. Its members argue that cycling would enliven the waterfront while also creating an easy way to travel between its different nodes of activity.
“Cycling is the most convenient, efficient mode of transportation known to man — and it’s just right for the harbourfront, which we want to be peaceful and well-connected,” says Martin Turner, a member of the Cycling Alliance. “I can see a family going there and hiring bikes for an afternoon. And commuters won’t have to sit on a bus for 45 minutes at the start of the morning. They can get some fresh air and improve their health.”
Turner and other cycling advocates hope that giving bikes a place on the waterfront could encourage cycling not only as a recreational activity but as a convenient way to get around the city. That would bring Hong Kong into line with cities as diverse as Hangzhou, New York and Paris, where cycling has become increasingly popular — and where local governments enthusiastically promote it as a healthy, ecologically-friendly form of transport.
“Our goal is to make cycling a part of everyday life in Hong Kong,” says Cycling Alliance member Philip Heung. For that to happen, though, cycling advocates must face the mother of all obstacles: changing government policy, which does not consider bicycles a means of transportation, even as cycling appears to grow more popular in both the New Territories and the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
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September 10th, 2011
Street performer on Sai Yeung Choi Street, Mongkok
Hong Kong is rich in visual symbols: a glittering skyline, red market lamps, green trams. But when you close your eyes and think of Hong Kong, what do you hear? That’s what Lawal Marafa, a professor of geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is trying to figure out by studying Hong Kong’s soundscape.
Together with another CUHK professor, Lam Kin-che, Marafa is trying to chart Hong Kong’s sounds and identify those that people like the most, with the goal of making the city a more tolerable place to live. It all comes down to the issue of noise pollution: the cacophony of roaring buses, endless jackhammering and mobile phone chatter that seems to dominate so much of Hong Kong. Instead of trying to make everything quieter, Marafa hopes that particularly pleasant sounds can be isolated and used to design better parks and urban spaces.
He points to Diamond Hill’s Nan Lian Garden as an example of how sound can be used to mask noise. Located next to Lung Chung Road, one of Kowloon’s busiest thoroughfares, the Tang Dynasty-style garden makes abundant use of fountains and waterfalls to fight the din of traffic. Even though the environment is still loud, says Marafa, the sound of rushing water puts people at ease, whereas the sound of traffic stresses them out.
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August 30th, 2011
Yue Hwa in 2005. Photo by choco_late
The Yue Hwa Chinese Products department store has stood at the corner of Jordan and Nathan roads for decades — and for decades, so did its big neon sign, a sentinel that marked the passage north into the seedy streets of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok.
Sometime in 2009, though, without fanfare or even the simplest of announcements, the sign was removed. So was a similar sign further down Nathan Road. Yue Hwa did not respond to inquiries about the signs’ fate. It is not clear why they were taken down or what happened to them.
Heritage activists were nonplussed about the sign’s disappearance. “We put our priority on conserving some historical buildings first due to limited resources,” says Roy Ng, policy officer at the Conservancy Association, which has fought to save numerous historic buildings from destruction.
Katty Law, a heritage activist who successfully lobbied against the redevelopment of the Central Market and Former Married Police Quarters, says she has “never thought about the issue, probably because many of us are upset with the light pollution problem.”
Although neon signs are some of the most characteristic elements of Hong Kong’s streetscape, there has been virtually no effort to research, document or preserve the city’s landmark them. In terms of heritage conservation, they simply aren’t on the radar.
“Neon signs are such a surprisingly under-researched subject,” says Lee Ho-yin, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Architectural Conservation Programme. “We see them every day and yet we don’t know much about them.”
With more and more businesses switching to cheaper, mass-produced forms of signage, neon is steadily disappearing from Hong Kong’s streets. The effect on Hong Kong’s visual identity could be profound. Neon is such an integral part of Hong Kong’s character that the mere mention of the city’s name conjures up images of glowing Chinese characters and streets bathed in a rainbow of light.
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August 18th, 2011
No cycling. No ball-playing. No gambling. No remote-controlled vehicles. No walking on the grass. No fun. Hong Kong’s public parks are burdened by so many rules, they end up discouraging the very thing that parks are meant to provide: an escape from the many stresses of urban life.
The same is true for many of the city’s other public spaces, from sidewalks to plazas and the ubiquitous “sitting-out areas” found in every neighbourhood. Caught in a stranglehold of metal fences, filled with concrete and ugly tile walls, they seem to discourage the lingering and spontaneous interaction that is cultivated by good public space.
In response, Hong Kong people make their own public space. Throughout the city, leftover bits of concrete and greenery have been claimed by citizens and transformed, through piecemeal intervention and crafty ingenuity, into lively, informal gathering spots.
Not far from my apartment in jam-packed Mongkok is a place I like to call the Hill With No Name. I call it this because, as far as I can tell, it has been overlooked by the gods of toponymy: it’s simply a small hill that was never developed, save for an underground reservoir and the Tsung Tsin Primary School. Even my friend Olivia, who grew up nearby and who attended the school as a kid, was stumped when I asked her what the hill was called. “I always just call it the hill behind Tsung Tsin,” she said.
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July 10th, 2011
It’s a bright Sunday afternoon and Central is buzzing. Thousands of Filipino domestic workers gather with friends for a weekly picnic. Shoppers stream through the luxury shops of Chater House to the somewhat less posh confines of Worldwide House, where large boxes of gifts are being packed for shipment to the Philippines. Charity workers stop passersby to ask for donations.
Hong Kong is famous for this kind of vigorous streetlife — except in this case, none of it is happening on the street, but instead one or two stories above ground, on the network of footbridges and elevated open areas that link many of Central’s shopping malls and office towers.
It isn’t just happening in Central. In dozens of spots around the city, from Tsuen Wan to Tseung Kwan O, footbridges and underpasses are creating pedestrian networks that extend well beyond the traditional domain of the sidewalk and public square. In the words of one architect, Hong Kong has entered into a “condition of groundlessness,” in which the ground has become just one of many layers of public activity.
The phenomenon has become so pervasive that, in many parts of Hong Kong, vast networks of interconnected malls, office towers and residential buildings have become the main form of pedestrian passage. It is possible to walk from Pacific Place Three, on the western edge of Wan Chai, all the way to the Macau Ferry Terminal in Sheung Wan — a distance of more than two kilometres — without once setting foot at street level.
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July 6th, 2011
University of Hong Kong Democracy Wall, 2009
When I first moved to Hong Kong three years ago, I was already accustomed to the particular quirks of local life, having spent around two and a half months exploring the city before I took the definitive flight from Canada. Getting used to life at the University of Hong Kong was another story.
No student bars, no lively campus media, no earnest political actions — student life in Hong Kong seemed remarkably dull compared to what I had gotten used to in Montreal. Travels around Asia suggested this was a uniquely Hong Kong problem, because the university campuses I visited in Taipei, Seoul, Beijing and Bangkok all had the kind of spark I normally associate with student life.
I don’t mean to be unfair to Hong Kong students. Some universities — the Chinese University in particular — have a strong activist tradition. But the atmosphere seems less concerned with intellectual engagement than with career advancement, and you’re far more likely to see a black-suited business student advertising a marketing conference than you are to see a fresh-faced, scruffy-haired animal-rights advocate promoting free vegan lunches next to the cafeteria.
What makes this especially perplexing is that, over the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about Hong Kong’s so-called Post-80s Generation, a new wave of young political and cultural activists who are leading a campaign to make Hong Kong a more equitable, democratic and conscientious place. This generation certainly does exist — you saw it in the lively protests against the high-speed rail link to the mainland, in the movement to support Ai Wei Wei and again in the resurgent July 1st pro-democracy march — but it seems only to represent a small minority of young people in Hong Kong.
If anything, student apathy has reached new heights in Hong Kong, with student unions at three of the city’s seven universities unable to elect executive councils earlier this year. This spring, on assignment for the South China Morning Post, I went to one of Hong Kong’s newest schools, City University, to find out what was going on.
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