A Day Around the Yamanote Line

Tokyo doesn’t really have a single discernible center. Most of the metropolis’ characteristic clusters of lighted advertisements and overloaded sidewalks — Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Shinagawa, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ueno, and (at Tokyo Station) Ginza — are strung together along the circular Yamanote Line, a Japan Railways loop that calls at the city’s busiest nodes. This necklace of light and activity effectively constitutes Tokyo’s peculiarly polycentric core.

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Writing on the Streets

It was late on a chilly March afternoon as I wandered through a small plaza near Houhai Lake in Beijing. The air was struggling to stay above freezing and I shivered in my spring jacket. Looking down, I noticed some Chinese characters drawn in water on the plaza’s grey paving stones. Whoever drew them was long gone; the cool air had kept them from evaporating.

I’d heard about water calligraphy before, but this was the first time I had seen it for myself. It’s a form of art that draws beauty from the ephemeral: like spoken words, these characters vanish into the air, their meaning lost to time and memory. It also says something about the futility of control. No matter how much you master your technique, no matter how well you squeeze these words into the form you want them to take, you are left with the same empty patch of stone you started with.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing water calligraphy in Hong Kong. For some reason, people here are much more inhibited in the way they use public space. Go to an open space in any given Chinese city and you’ll see a far greater range of activities than in a comparable place in Hong Kong. Go to Shenzhen’s Civic Square on a nice Sunday afternoon, for instance, and you’ll find people driving electric race cars, playing instruments, flying kites, riding bikes, doing water calligraphy, singing and dancing. There’s irony in the fact that people behave far more exuberantly in an authoritarian state than in an ostensibly free city.

That said, I did come across something in Hong Kong that reminded me of water calligraphy. In Man Ming Lane, just behind Exit C of the Yau Ma Tei MTR station, someone used white chalk to write a lengthy screed on the redbrick sidewalk. I saw it late one night and, since I live only 15 minutes away by foot, I returned the next day to photograph it. But most of the chalk had already been worn off and it was impossible to read most of what had been written.

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Dusk in Dongzhimen

Three subway lines, two major expressways, and countless buses converge on Dongzhimen, at the northeastern corner of Beijing’s historic core. At the end of the workday, that makes this transfer point one of the busiest in the city, a whirlwind of streaming throngs.

Beijingers usually point their tastebuds toward Dongzhimen to visit Guijie, one of the Chinese capital’s most popular dining destinations, which is not far away. On sweaty summer days, though, the crowds rushing through Dongzhimen aren’t usually in the mood for that street’s famous Mongolian hot pot. Nor do the marble-clad, air-conditioned malls nearby seem to attract many seeking temporarily relief from the heat. The refreshment of choice is, instead, fresh fruit, and street carts converge on the area toward dusk to provide, dishing out heaps of the city’s famously excellent watermelon and other juicy snacks to homebound commuters.

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Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition of Muse magazine. The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.

Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that it took a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years. “We’ve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long,” she said, looking up at a rusted balcony on this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. “But we couldn’t convince the government to save the whole street.”

That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the street — with its single row of tong laus built just before and after World War II — as the perfect backdrop for their weepy drama about a shoemaker’s family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting the narrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in Hong Kong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group of architects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of the buildings on Wing Lee Street.

Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site. For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement was only a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entire approach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that is sensitive to the environment, that enhances the city’s streetlife and sense of community and that respects Hong Kong’s history and heritage. “Right now, developers can do whatever they want, and they’re facilitated by the government. We need planning controls,” she said.

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The Altars at the End of the Street

Like the mosaic depictions of Catholic saints that adorn the front entrances of many Portuguese houses, the small altars found in every corner of Hong Kong are an everyday expression of faith, more humble than that of a temple or church, but in some ways more authentic.

I came across these small altars in a lane in Sai Ying Pun, a hilly neighbourhood in Hong Kong Island’s Western District. The main altar is Buddhist, but there is also a jiu choi mau — a lucky cat meant to bring in great fortune — and an even smaller altar of the type used to pay homage to various gods or ancestors.

I’m not sure if the altars were installed by the lane’s dried seafood vendors, its residents or both. I’d be curious to find out how altars like these are enshrined in Hong Kong law — are they subject to the same restrictions and regulations as outdoor seating, for example? And when the altars are in public space like these, who maintains them?

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Van Brunt Street

For all the questionable writing that’s abused or insensitively applied the term “urban frontier”, Brooklyn’s sleepy, sometimes desolate Red Hook neighborhood actually feels like one — and nowhere is this more apparent than on somnambulant Van Brunt Street.

The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare sets the pace for Red Hook’s streetlife with its lack thereof: as much a testament to the street’s sedateness as to the pioneering urban horticulturalists who tend them, giant sunflowers sprout from the sidewalk cracks, leaping to human height. The still life composition of Van Brunt’s Hopperesque facades brings to mind country hamlets closed up on Sunday. And on a streetscape that conjures the Great Plains, a prominent restaurant bears a coincidentally appropriate name — Fort Defiance.

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Street Seafood

Get yourself some cheap beer, a plastic stool, a big round table and a bunch of friends — and you’ve got yourself the makings of a Hong Kong seafood dinner. Bowrington Road is one of the more expensive spots for al fresco seafood dining, but its location, next to a busy street market and just down the road from Hong Kong’s most popular shopping district, is unique.

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Alone in Chicago

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The Art of Personal Space

In New York, bulging sidewalks have led to the partial pedestrianization of Times Square and plans for something similar along teeming 34th St. In Cairo, fed up pedestrians often take matters into their own hands, competing with cars to form express lanes off the sidewalks of window-shopping meccas like Talaat Harb. And anyone navigating a busy scramble crossing like the one just outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station might feel like an extra in Braveheart, surging into battle against the horde on the opposing corner.

Ever since the concept of “personal space” was first coined in the late 1960s, the increasing density of the world’s rapidly urbanizing population has meant that it’s gone largely forgotten or ignored. Now, two artists on two different continents are fighting back — in a manner of speaking. As a Digital Arts postgraduate at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, Nathan Destro created a “personal space protector” to keep strangers at a distance.

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40 Seconds at a Shenzhen Streetcorner

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Corner of Jiabin Road and Renmin South Road, Luohu, Shenzhen

Noodles and a Sex Shop

J’avance, j’arrive à ce qui semble être les confins de ce quartier.

Un dimanche soir pluvieux. Mi-printemps boueux, 23h42.

L’odeur est très désagréable, ça me prend au nez. Pas étonnant, un îlot complet à récemment été calciné. Quel gâchis ! De grands bâtiments aux arcades encore sensibles, qui tombe en ruine, qui semble prêt à tomber. Dans la rue, je suis désormais presque seul.

À l’intersection, une ample place. Métro Atwater : un immense forum, un cinéma gargantuesque et puéril.

Elle m’étonne : malgré que je sois si prêt du centre-ville, à un jet de pierre de la tourelle de la bourse, cet espace est vide. Vide. Et vide de sens.

Dans un angle de la ville qui semble vide de tout sens d’urbanité. Je suis déstabilisé.

Je retourne sur mes pas, je n’aime pas les limites.  Sans pour autant éprouver le moindre désir à me voir traverser cet îlot à nouveau, incinéré, laissé pour compte, et où l’odeur de la poussière est si forte qu’elle me prend à la gorge. M’étouffe ! L’indigeste sentiment est d’autant plus fort lorsque je balaye ces vitrines, brisées, d’où émanent, d’un coup de bourrasque, ces souvenirs d’une nuit enflammée.

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Deng vs. Mao

I wonder what Mao Zedong would have thought of Shenzhen.

Waiting to Cross the Street

Shinjuku, Tokyo

Robson Street, Vancouver

East Village, New York

Renovating Hong Kong’s Flower Market

There are many easy things in life, but selling flowers, apparently, isn’t one of them. For more than 30 years, Cheung Yuk-hing and his family have run a flower stall in a laneway near Mong Kok’s Flower Market Road, selling peonies, orange trees and other plants they grow in a New Territories orchard. The hours are long, profit margins low and the family faces a constant battle with hawker control officers who regularly fine them for putting their plants on the sidewalk.

“We were the first to put our plants out in the streets, before there were so many other flower shops. Now everyone does it,” said Cheung, who was fined several thousand dollars during the run-up to the Lunar New Year.

Business in the Flower Market has been tough for years as competition between vendors has increased and rents have soared. Now its merchants have something else to worry about: an Urban Renewal Authority plan to renovate Flower Market Road and a row of prewar apartment buildings on Prince Edward Road West. Some merchants worry that, once the renovations are complete, rents will increase even more and the market’s small businesses will be pushed out.

“It won’t help us,” said Wing Chiu, whose family has done business on Flower Market Road for 10 years. “The people who come buy flowers are locals, but this plan is just for the tourists. Business is already lower than before and this won’t do anything to bring in new customers.”

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