December 6th, 2010
The Internet meets the MTR: trying on a jacket bought online.
Photos by Oliver Tsang for the South China Morning Post
Nobody seemed alarmed by the sight of two 17-year-old boys playing with guns in the Hong Kong MTR. It was early Wednesday evening at Prince Edward Station and Kelvin Cheung was inspecting a pistol he had arranged to buy from Simon Lee.
“It’s for war games,” Cheung explained as he pulled the trigger on an empty semi-automatic air-powered handgun. He has been playing war games for six months, he said, and he found Lee on Uwants, an online marketplace. After confirming the sale online, they arranged to meet at Prince Edward to finish the transaction. Cheung paid HK$300 for the gun, which he said would have cost HK$570 in a retail store.
“This is my first time buying from Simon, but I actually have two other purchases I’m going to pick up in the station tonight,” said Cheung.
As the rush hour crowds thickened, about fifty other people milled around the edges of the station’s fare-paid zone, most of them waiting to pick up goods they had ordered online. Cash changed hands; so did makeup kits, concert tickets, cameras and bags full of clothing.
In most parts of the world, online shopping is a straightforward process: find what you want, enter your credit card information and have it shipped to your home. Not so in Hong Kong, where analysts describe the online retail market as “underdeveloped” and consumers have long been sceptical of buying things online.
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February 21st, 2010
It’s two in the morning on Talaat Harb Street, the heart of downtown Cairo, and the sidewalks are sclerotic. People shuffle slowly past shop windows exploding with merchandise. An intense white light beams across the thoroughfare. Avoiding hawkers thrusting t-shirts in their faces, trying to lure them to clothes and sneakers piled in tables approximately every ten feet along the way, the throngs spill out onto the street, taking control most of the roadway, permitting only a lane or two for a line of taxis to proceed.
The scene doesn’t suggest it, but suburban flight is no stranger to Cairo. Its well-to-do are increasingly leaving the city center for suburban villas in the desert to the east, may now prefer to shop in tonier Heliopolis, or the cavernous (and, crucially, air-conditioned) City Stars Mall. Even a seemingly more entrenched presence, the American University, has largely decamped to a vast new McCampus on the city’s outskirts.
None of this seems to have affected the density of the crowd along Talaat Harb.
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April 5th, 2009
Anti-capitalist street art, SoHo, New York
It’s a Saturday evening and the Boston subway is packed. The train is stalled on the platform at Downtown Crossing station, and the car has been filling up for nearly thirty minutes. Tensions are rising. One new arrival finds me slumped in my seat, impatient:
“Aw, look at this!” he announces to the train. “This guy can go wherever he wants, but can I go to his neighborhood? I’m not hating on him. I don’t know anything about him. I’m just saying, I’m angry, and I want to take it out. I want to do something to him. Because times have changed. It’s gonna be like the new 70s.” He is middle-aged, black, bedraggled, carrying a dusty briefcase. He looks like he is struggling, but not destitute. As he begins to be surrounded by more impoverished riders – and more affluent targets – he finishes his rant, asks for the time, and starts wondering, incessantly, when the train will move again.
Cities by their very nature are points of attraction for dense masses of people, compelling exchange, activism, and interaction. But when the world starts to become unpleasant, cities begin to manifest the dark side of these normally positive activities. The shimmering skyline becomes a symbol of excess; public spaces become fora for unrest rather than green lungs or safety valves; begging, crime, protest, and selfishness become more rude, more common, more crude.
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September 29th, 2008
September 14th, 2008
The Galéries Lafayette in Paris still is a gorgeous retail space
As with so many things having to do with taste in the 19th century, the French generally get the credit for inventing the department store: the Parisian pioneer Au bon marché adopted the formula in 1852, just at the beginning of the massive transformation of the city under Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Napoléon III. In his novel The Ladies’ Delight (Au bonheur des dames), Emile Zola tells the story of its beginning from the point of view of a plucky young woman from the provinces who is captivated by the bustle and exuberance of the new form of selling things.
She defends the high-volume, quick turnover approach to her uncle who is forced out of business by the department store. “You probably are more competent than me, “ she says at one point, betraying a modesty that Zola seemed to admire, “but I’ll say what I’m thinking …prices, rather than be set as they were before, by 50 businesses, are set today by four or five, and they’re lower, thanks to the power of the capital and the strength of their clientele. It’s so much better for the public, that’s all.“ Reading that is like hearing an apologist for Wal-Mart (although it should be noted that Zola says Au bon marché provided health care for its staff while Wal-Mart had to be pressured into doing that more than a century later) which perhaps shows again that there’s nothing new under the sun. At any rate, the Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker adapted—or maybe reinvented—the form in the 1870s in his home town. His success inspired much imitation. By the late 19th century big cities in the US and Canada each had one or more department stores that were not just places for buying but places where everyone went.
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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
April 9th, 2008
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After hours at the Price Chopper, Queen West
April 1st, 2008
Nanjing Road, from People’s Park east to the Bund, is a good place to take in the contradictions of Shanghai. Its ornate architecture and procession of grand department stores are a reminder of the city’s colonial past, when Nanjing Road was the heart of the International Settlement, jointly controlled by Britain and the United States and one of the several foreign concessions in the city. Today, the eastern part of Nanjing Road has been eschewed by many upwardly mobile Shanghainese in favour sleeker shopping districts elsewhere in the city, and it has a somewhat tacky atmosphere that is at odds with its grandiosity, especially at night. Touts and hustlers follow foreign and domestic tourists, trying to lure them into brothels and karaoke bars, while electric trolleys taking shoppers from one end of the street to the other push their way through the crowds.
March 12th, 2008
Ahh the Bowness Shopping Centre. If it’s not a power centre – it’s a strip mall; that’s just Calgary. Home to baked goods, groceries, and family videos, one can always sit back enjoy a coffee, get their nails done and pick up the latest Catholic reads.
The strangest mishmash stores… complete with signs from another time.
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December 3rd, 2007
Mark Slutsky sent me a link to this video today, showing a market lining a railway in Thailand. Within seconds of a train passing through, the market springs back to life.
Naturally, the video raises some pretty obvious questions, like why on earth would a market be located on a set of train tracks? Andrew Leonard, on Salon’s How the World Works, points the way to some explanations. Apparently, the train tracks in question are actually part of the the Mae Klong Railway, an interurban line that runs diesel trams from from Bangkok in the east to Samut Songkhram in the west. Along the way, it passes down some local roads, including a neighbourhood market. The trains are infrequent enough that they don’t pose much of a danger or inconvenience to shoppers or vendors.
According to Justin Bur, who wrote in to Salon, this is not so different from streets markets in Belgium or France through which trams pass. In Hong Kong, trams pass right through the middle of a street market in North Point.
Photos by Richard Barrow
November 12th, 2007
You can’t find an urban tradition more firmly rooted in Asia’s cities than the night market. Since emerging in Tang dynasty China, about 1,200 years ago, they have become a quintessential part of the urban experience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and throughout Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, night markets are so firmly rooted they have spawned an entire cuisine of street foods known as xiao chi, or “small eats.”
Now, just as Chinese immigrants brought the night market tradition to other parts of Asia, they have taken it across the Pacific. The largest night market in North American can be found in Richmond, a flat, sprawling suburb of Vancouver about a twenty minute drive south of downtown. Since it first emerged in a shopping mall parking lot in 2000, the Richmond Night Market has grown into a 400-stall behemoth that draws up to 35,000 people per night. It is held every weekend between May and October, from 7pm to midnight. Although most of the people who visit the night market are Asian, including many Chinese — all of the announcements over the PA system are in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, and signs on nearly all stalls are in English and Chinese — it still manages to attract a fairly diverse crowd of Vancouverites, especially as it has gained attention in the English-language media.
Unlike its Asian counterparts, the Richmond Night Market does not take place in the confines of a street. Instead, it’s held in a vast open space, sandwiched between the Fraser River and an industrial park, accessible only by car. But the stalls are arranged in rows, creating the illusion of a crowded lane. Despite its distinctly suburban setting, it offers a kind of outdoor space of interaction that is normally foreign to the suburbs. This is especially true in the most crowded part of the market, around the food vendors. Amidst the odd scent of curried fish balls and miniature donuts, thousands of hungry people munch red bean pancakes, barbecued squid, noodle soup and tong shui.
Despite its popularity, though, the night market’s future is threatened. Earlier this year, its landlord decided not to renew its lease, perhaps seeing development opportunity in its waterfront location. Even with strong support from City Hall, the Richmond tourism bureau and the local chamber of commerce, the market has been unable to find a home for its upcoming 2008 season. It would need at least 15 acres to operate, but finding such a large chunk of open space in Richmond is a huge challenge.
Recognizing the market’s potential both as a tourist attraction and an incubator for small businesses, one Richmond city councillor proposed creating a permanent market space underneath the guideway of the Canada Line, an elevated railway that will link Richmond to Vancouver in 2009. “When I was in Beijing, I saw markets under the roadways and overpasses. They utilize any available space,” he told the Richmond News.
While the councillor’s proposal would do nothing to solve the night market’s immediate need for space, it is a brilliant long-term solution. Not only would it reduce the need for parking, it would create a hub of activity around the Canada Line, which is already attracting new high-density development. Wouldn’t it be fitting if the Richmond Night Market, so suburban until now, ultimately ended up resembling its more urban counterparts across the Pacific?
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June 30th, 2007
According to many, especially disgruntled Hong Kong shopkeepers, Shenzhen’s Luohu (Lo Wu) district functions as a giant discount mall, just over the border. There’s even a book (widely available in Hong Kong) titled ‘Shop in Shenzhen’ with advice on where to get the best knockoff purses, and where the best foot massages are to be found. Here’s what it looks like, if you’re able to make it out of Luohu’s Commercial City mall, where central Luohu actually has some quite lively pedestrian streets, just one metro stop north of the border with Hong Kong.
Further west, Hua Qiang Bei road is pulling young crowds increasingly interested in clothes, rather than wholesale electronics.
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May 16th, 2007
Venice
Genoa
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May 9th, 2007
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Fruit markets on Commercial Drive and East Georgia Street
