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 13th, 2009
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.
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November 23rd, 2009
Place Gérald-Godin in 1979 and 2009. Compilation by Guillaume St-Jean
Over the past decade, Montreal has invested heavily in big-ticket squares and plazas, including the remarkable Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and redesigned Victoria Square, both completed in 2003, and the surprisingly successful Place des Festivals, which opened earlier this year. But some of the smaller new squares are just as impressive, perhaps doubly so for the fact that they’ve been perfectly integrated into the city’s life without any kind of the fuss or introspection demanded by their bigger counterparts.
Place Gérald-Godin is the best example of these small new squares. It sits just outside the sole entrance to Mont-Royal metro, one of the city’s busiest stations, and as a result it’s busy throughout the day. Until recently, however, it wasn’t so much a square as a patch of grass traversed by a couple of asphalt pathways. A building that housed a caisse populaire (and before that, a bicycle shop) occupied the corner of Berri and Mount Royal, next to the station, making the space in front feel like more like an afterthought than a real place.
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August 31st, 2009
Hong Kong’s prewar buildings number in the hundreds, yet the few of them that remain continue to be knocked down for mediocre new development. This photo compilation by Lee Chi-man is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen. Just a few years ago (the top photo appears to have been taken in 2003, during the SARS crisis), the northwest corner of Un Chau and Pei Ho streets in Sham Shui Po was occupied by a ramshackle but typically elegant example of early twentieth century Hong Kong architecture. Like many buildings built before World War II, it was in poor condition, but it stood its ground with remarkable grace. It had enormous potential for restoration.
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July 31st, 2009
Lee Chi-man, Hong Kong’s answer to Guillaume St-Jean, finds old photos of Hong Kong streetscapes and heads to the spot where they were taken to replicate them. So far, he has compiled around 400 scenes, showing just how drastically Hong Kong has changed over the course of the twentieth century.
The photos above illustrate how many of those changes have been for the worse. In the top photo, you see Central in the 1950s, looking down Des Voeux Road towards the bank headquarters. Today, the banks are still there, but their headquarters have morphed into postmodern skyscrapers. The old shophouses that once lined Des Voeux are gone; their graceful arcades and simple signboards have given way to a mess of overbearing corporate storefronts, bland façades and gaudy plastic advertisements.
The worst thing about this is the loss of human scale: whereas Des Voeux was once well-proportioned, with nicely-textured buildings and an understated elegance, it is now an unpleasant concrete canyon. As the street has become more unbearable over the years, footbridges have been built so that people may avoid it altogether, which only adds to the hostile atmosphere. If the effects of that aren’t evident in the photos above, they certain are in Lee’s other Des Voeux scenes.
June 28th, 2009
Whenever you come across a particularly charming and surprising corner of Hong Kong, you can almost be sure that the Urban Renewal Authority has plans to do away with it. Although its official vision is “to create quality and vibrant urban living in Hong Kong,” most of its developments obliterate tight-knit communities and organic urban growth in favour of shopping malls, office developments and housing estates. Cynical Hong Kongers see the URA as a proxy for the big land developers that control this town; its projects are usually little more than land grabs for Hong Kong’s economic elite. Aside from displacing well-established neighbourhood social networks, they replace small-scale, independent businesses with corporate chain stores, which degrades the entrepreneurial spirit on which this city was built.
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June 22nd, 2009
Opening weekend for the High Line, Manhattan’s latest, most expensive new playground, is a mob scene: a line of cabs and SUVs blocks long throng the streets of the Meatpacking District, which, full for once, seem almost grateful to be receiving as much attention as they did when trucks filled with carcasses trundled down them without reproach from sleeping neighbors. Now, every Jersey plate throws looks of shock, scorn, and derision, even if it belongs to a Montclair family with 2.5 kids rather than a butcher shop in Paterson.
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June 14th, 2009
“There’s no way they can move us,” the shopkeeper said. “After three years, they’re still not done with Phase 1. How will they ever get to Phase 2?” He chuckled, pointing at the neighborhood-sized shopping center being erected one block away.
Such is the precarious state of Kunming’s old city. Of the ancient walled city, once four kilometers across, only a single cross-shaped area formed by Confucian Temple Street and Guanghua Street has escaped demolition to date. Yet this tiny area is a treasure trove of pre-1949 Chinese architecture, from wooden shop fronts and stone courtyards to a pair of prewar tenements called the “Sister Buildings” that bend gracefully to the curving streets. Amazingly, most of the shopkeeper’s neighbors have lived here for their entire lives; tea shops and little restaurants continue to do business even as squads of shovel-toting laborers dig up the streets to lay new gas lines.
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June 7th, 2009
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.
March 27th, 2009
I never thought there could be another major newspaper that would make the Montreal Gazette seem hip and with-it — but then I started reading the South China Morning Post. Whereas the Gazette at least tries to overcome its fuddy-duddy image as the newspaper of record for grey-haired West Islanders (sometimes quite successfully, as in the case of On Two Wheels, its insightful bike blog, or Andy Riga’s new city life blog), the SCMP has almost willed itself into irrelevance. Its website still hides behind an overly-restrictive paywall and it has made only the most hesitant steps towards new media. What it desperately needs is something like the New York Times’ City Room, but the SCMP either doesn’t have the resources or the will to do that.
But there’s hope. Earlier this month, the SCMP teamed up with entrepreneur and cultural critic Sir David Tang to host a forum to discuss the future of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a government-led effort to turn a swath of reclaimed land into a centre for the arts. The forum will be led by a panel of international cultural elites (see below) but the public will be able to ask questions. Interestingly, the SCMP has asked readers to send in their questions via YouTube, and the best of these will be shown at the event. The response hasn’t been overwhelming, to say the least (just three people have posted videos so far), but at least it’s an opportunity for those who might not normally attend a forum like this to make themselves heard.
I’m tempted to post a question myself, if I can think of a way to boil down all of my concerts about West Kowloon into a single coherent sentence. The entire project is terribly misguided, an opinion shared by just about everyone but the government itself, and the current discussion is as much about how to avoid a complete disaster as it is to create a successful cultural district. The official plan calls for three large theatres, a 10,000-seat performance venue, four museums, an art exhibition centre and at least four public plazas. Unfortunately, if that’s the recipe, the final product will be an utterly indigestible mishmash of giant mega-projects, not a lively and creative neighbourhood. It’s a bureaucrat’s vision of culture, the skin without the bones, an entire neighbourhood of Lincoln Centres and Places des Arts.
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January 30th, 2009
Boston, considered one of the most historic cities in the United States, has still managed to lose much more of its architectural past than it retains. Sacrificed to urban experiments from concrete piazzas to towers-in-the-park, generations of honeycombed alleys and densely-crammed pockets of housing have largely disappeared from the city center, their former presence registered only in ancient street plans and ghost-like remains. When I first moved to the area in the late 1990s, I would comb through books of old maps and photographs of the city – such as Jane Holtz Kay’s Lost Boston – with almost the same enthusiasm with which I set off to explore what was left of the city itself.
The internet has grown to include a wealth of resources to help track down the lost urban fabric of past centuries – not the least of which is the Library of Congress’ vast database of historical photographs. But my interest was piqued this week, when I discovered that the Boston Public Library released its much more intimate, if eclectic, collection on flickr. The photos, prints, and postcards it contains present a city that is both immensely altered and curiously unchanged from its 19th century self, providing the contemporary viewer the opportunity to reconsider just which “history” preserved Boston embodies today.
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December 30th, 2008
In common law countries, when a local government wants to clear away a house or neighbourhood for large-scale development, it need only expropriate the property, toss its owner some compensation and call it a day. That sort of thing has been more difficult in China, which shored up private property rights in 2007, making it harder for the government to simply evict people from their homes. But that doesn’t stop it from engaging in more creative means to an end.
Not long ago, a friend forwarded me this video posted on Danwei, a site that covers Chinese media and urban life. It was apparently shot last October in Shenyang, the capital of the northeastern Liaoning province, in a neighbourhood that is slowly being cleared away for new development. In order to pressure the remaining residents to accept compensation for their homes, a 24/7 loudspeaker blasts propaganda reminding them of all the reasons why they should take the money and go.
August 17th, 2008
Christ Church Cathedral
Before it evolved into Montreal’s main downtown shopping strip, Ste. Catherine Street was the backbone of an affluent residential neighbourhood stretching west of Bleury Street for nearly two miles. This period is reflected in the small handful of nineteenth-century churches that still dot the street, two of which, Christ Church Cathedral and St. James United Church, now find themselves in the heart of the main retail district.
St. James opened in 1889 as the largest Methodist church in Canada, with room enough for 2,000 worshippers, but by the time that Canadian Methodists merged into the United Church, in 1925, the cost of maintaining such a grand structure was too much for its congregation to bear. Two years later, the church built a two-storey commercial block in front of its façade, obscuring most of its beautiful Neo-Gothic features but providing an important source of revenue. A gabled entrance in the middle of the block, marked by a red-and-blue neon sign, led into the church.
Just down the street, Christ Church, Montreal’s Anglican cathedral, was faced with similar financial difficulties at the end of the 1980s. It came up with an even more inventive solution: lease the space behind and underneath the church to a private developer who would build a shopping mall and office tower. The church, which was completed in 1859, was suspended by a series of concrete pillars and beams as the ground underneath it was excavated for the underground mall.
Enabled by technology that would have been unavailable in earlier decades, Christ Church was able to incorporate commercial use into its grounds in a more sensitive way than St. James. But, despite its obvious shortcoming, I actually enjoyed the layers of use, texture and appearance created by the commercial block that was built in front of the church. Every time I walked past it, the sight of its two towers rising above the grimy Ste. Catherine Street shops was a revelation; the neon sign hanging above the sidewalk, meanwhile, added a bit of idiosyncratic Gothamesque sleaze that fit perfectly with the Gothic aesthetic of the rest of the church.
Not everyone saw things like me, though, and in 2005, work began to dismantle the centre portion of the commercial block, exposing St. James’ façade after nearly 80 years. The resulting arrangement is certainly pleasant, and the church is now fronted by an attractive square bracketed by the corner remnants of the 1927 commercial building. Still, it seems a bit conventional, and I can’t help but miss what was there before.
St. James United Church
July 4th, 2008
Earlier this year, Helen Fotopulos, mayor of the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, stood beaming over a podium as she announced plans to revitalize the old garment district on the eastern edge of Mile End, bounded on the west by St. Laurent, on the east by Henri-Julien, on the south by Maguire and on the north by the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks.
“This no man’s land will be transformed,” she declared, outlining $9-million in infrastructural investments that the city hopes will invite new investment and development in the district. Work will start this summer on widening the sidewalks along St. Viateur between St. Laurent and de Gaspé, burying electrical lines and installing new lampposts. New sidewalks will be built on de Gaspé too, which currently has one only on the east side of the street.
Next year, the city will extend St-Viateur east to Henri-Julien, which could involve the expropriation of one building and two vacant lots. In 2010, a new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists will be built over the CPR tracks, linking the area to nearby Rosemont metro.
The city estimates that its investments will generate $250-million worth of private real estate development as buildings are renovated and vacant lots developed. The only potential snag is that, as post-apocalyptic as it may sometimes seen, the garment district is far from being a no man’s land: thousands of people live and work there, in textile factories, small businesses, design studios and artists’ workshops. In an atmosphere of citywide dissatisfaction over the city’s handling of such major projects as the renovation of the Main and the redevelopment of Griffintown, some are keeping a close eye on how it proceeds in Mile End.
Mile-End’s industrial area owes its existence to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s. Large warehouses and factories were built around the turn of the century, like the Van Horne Warehouse on St. Laurent, whose water tower has become a landmark in the city’s north end skyline. In the 1950s and ’60s, the area took on its present form when giant garment factories were built along de Gaspé, towering over the surrounding neighbourhood.
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