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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November 19th, 2011
This is the last in a series of three posts about Hong Kong’s waterfront public spaces. Read the first one here and the second here.
The promenade that runs for 850 metres along the Central ferry piers is one of the best public spaces in Hong Kong. I suspect this partly by accident. In the late 1990s, land reclamation for the airport railway and Tung Chung MTR line pushed the Central waterfront more than 300 metres outwards, so the six ferry piers that serve Hong Kong’s outlying islands were relocated. In 2006, they were joined by two new Star Ferry piers and two public piers used by pleasure craft and other small boats. A promenade was created to link each of the piers, which are in turn linked to the rest of Central by a footbridge network.
At first glance, the promenade is pretty ordinary; it makes extensive use of the same chintzy pink tiles that are found everywhere in Hong Kong. (I really, really wish the government would invest in some high-quality paving stones. With nearly HK$600 billion in reserves, it could surely afford some nice granite, no?) But there are several small touches that make the space more functional and more comfortable than other government-designed parks and plazas.
First is the provision of two parallel pathways. One runs along the water and is lined by benches, ledges and steps where people sit while they are waiting for their ferry. The second is covered and well-lit — a kind of expressway for people rushing to catch their ferries. The two are separated by steps and planters with curvy edges that create some interesting nooks in which to sit. The planters are filled with shrubs and fast-growing banyan trees that provide plenty of shade. The multiple levels and passages give the promenade a nuanced feel that isn’t found in many other public spaces in Hong Kong.
Those are the bones of the space; they’re ugly but they work well. The flesh and blood comes from the constant flow of ferry passengers, who are joined by joggers, fishermen, cyclists and truant schoolchildren. Most of the piers contain independently-owned shops selling snacks and drinks. (There’s even a bar stall selling craft beer, spirits and wine, which brings in people like myself who don’t need to use the ferries.) In the evening, there are always plenty of people sitting around, drinking beer, snacking and fishing. There are lots of couples, too — this is the only place in otherwise reserved Hong Kong where I always see public displays of affection.
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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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October 31st, 2011
Gary Hustwit clearly wanted his new documentary, Urbanized, to get more people talking or writing about cities. But he might not have expected the very literal way that admirers at Field Notes, a stationery company, would help facilitate that goal — by supplying notepads branded with the film’s logo to audiences attending early theatrical runs.
According to info printed inside, the notebooks, which are like disposable Moleskines, were inspired by “the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books”, boasting “innards printed on a Miller TP104 28″ x 40″ 2-color printing press,” and were inevitably produced in Portland, Oregon — capital of all that’s preciously artisanal. It’s not exactly surprising that any tribute to Hustwit would come in the form of such obsessively crafted items; his first two films, Helvetica and Objectified, have attained a certain cult status among font geeks and industrial design nerds, respectively.
Urbanized, the third in Hustwit’s so-called “design trilogy,” has a slightly different valence. There’s a definite utilitarian logic in the decision to value Helvetica over another font, or in thinking about how to craft a tool or household object. But urban design impacts many more lives on a scale orders of magnitude larger than either.
As the film chronicles, that realization has forced a once-distant discipline to consult, increasingly, those whose lives it affects. Many of the ideas the documentary presents underscore Hustwit’s enthusiasm for such engagement — whether initiated by planners and architects or their erstwhile subjects. “You have book clubs,” he implored, after a recent screening in Manhattan, “start city clubs!” Urbanized could be seen as a simple, layered presentation of world cities’ design choices — but to the extent that the documentary moves in any one direction, it’s as a meditation on how and why urban design should be democratized.
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September 29th, 2011
Alors que les débats sont parfois lourds dans l’administration municipale lorsque vient le moment de voter des budgets d’aménagement, l’on constate qu’en quelques années, Montréal a réussi à altérer l’image de plusieurs de ses rues commerciales avec des idées simples et peu dispendieuses.
Après avoir passé les derniers mois à débattre et à préparer des projets de réaménagement de l’espace urbain et des rues de Montréal, nous avons constaté que trois éléments ont eu un impact réel sur la qualité de nos rues, à savoir l’implantation de terrasses sur les trottoirs (qui créées des milieux de vie animés), la multiplication des plantes et autres éléments de végétalisation de l’emprise (la plupart des éléments étant temporaires et versatiles) ainsi que le changement culturel chez les montréalais, à savoir le raisonnement selon lequel désormais on ne peut plus accepter que la rue soit un simple axe de circulation des biens et personnes.
Ici quelques exemples de la rue Dante, qui semble désormais un petit jardin en pleine ville et où les terrasses et plantes rappellent finalement la douceur de la Méditerranée…
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August 29th, 2011
It comes to me whenever I am in Vancouver: an urge to watch the sunset. Pulled by memories of blue Pacific waters buffeting a tangerine sky, I make my way to English Bay Beach, where I find a seat on one of the large pieces of driftwood that have been arranged on the sand, and join hundreds of others in the nightly spectacle.
Last month, though, on my final day in Canada, I was taken to watch the sunset from the roof of the new Vancouver Convention Centre, a sharply geometric structure that rises from a broad concrete plaza next to Coal Harbour. As I climbed the metal staircase up to the roof, I was sceptical that it would be anything close to the English Bay experience. When we arrived, I was surprised. Built at a slight angle, covered in wild grass, with a gravel path cutting diagonally across it, the roof feels like a country meadow that has somehow found itself three stories above ground. Watching the sun set from there, over the water of Coal Harbour and the tall fir trees of Stanley Park, was a surprisingly bucolic experience.
On the surface, that sounds reminiscent to other recent experiments in aerial urban greenery, like New York’s wildly popular High Line. But the convention centre’s roof has more local roots. In many ways, it is the latest product of a style of urbanism born in 1978, when Arthur Erickson designed Robson Square, a large civic centre in downtown Vancouver that combined provincial law courts, a municipal art gallery, government offices and a series of public spaces.
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August 29th, 2011
The walk from the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires, to Puerto Madero, its redeveloped waterfront, begins inauspiciously. Cars barrel down multilane boulevards devoid of people; a weed-strewn lot slated to become a monument to the country’s deeply-loved former president, Juan Perón, lies unconvincingly fallow.
Then there are the railroad tracks severing most of the city from the streets near the sea: Puerto Madero’s redevelopment was accompanied by the construction of a new light rail line, helping turn this frustrating barrier into a vital transit link. But here, in the hostile borderland between B.A.’s bustling Microcentro and the waterfront, the ominous sight of Puerto Madero Station inspires little confidence, its relatively new platform facing tracks overgrown by weeds.
The unused station was not meant to serve the light rail line, which blasts past it, but a half-built commuter rail restoration that had never entirely got off the ground. The sight of the overgrown tracks, encapsulating the miserable fate of much of Argentina’s older, conventional rail network — a once sterling, nationwide system now reduced to a few rump lines around the capital — illustrates exactly the sort of broader decline in national prestige that Puerto Madero’s rise was meant to help reverse. However ambitious those intentions, though, they hardly make it less disconcerting that Puerto Madero Station, spotless in its desertion, serves as an appropriate introduction to Buenos Aires’ newly built-up waterfront itself.
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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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August 17th, 2011
Vancouver is working hard to shake off its reputation as a somewhat pious city that values good mountain views over vibrant streetlife. Its architecture has seen a shift away from the back-to-nature style of the 1970s, 80s and 90s towards something bolder and more urban, like the recently-completed Woodwards redevelopment. There seems to be more tolerance for cheeky public art — witness Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca (which makes up for all the lame whale murals around town) and Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver. And there is more and more playful new street furniture.
Last week, I came across one such piece of furniture in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The stretch of Robson Street in front of the gallery had been closed for construction for several weeks; when it reopened, a kind of undulating fake lawn was installed. It had bright yellow “grass” and was shaded by white umbrellas; it was a bright, sunny afternoon and the lawn was thronged with people. I returned later, after the sun had set, and sat down for awhile. A couple of guys laid down on the grass, holding hands, and one of them wondered aloud, “What is this doing here? This is so weird!” But if others thought it was strange, it didn’t show. A couple of people worked on their laptops, faces lit by the screen’s blue glow. Others sat cross-legged, talking to friends. It was as if it had always been there.
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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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June 19th, 2011
Top: 1970s. Bottom: 2011. Photo by Lee Chi-man
It’s always easy to depict a city’s changes through the broadest of strokes. Buildings fall so that others may rise; new roads are built; shops come and go. But the most important transformations are often the most subtle.
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April 7th, 2011
The original, ca. 1800 Mangin-Goerck Plan (top) and part of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, as engraved by William Bridges
Last month, New York celebrated the bicentennial of one of its most iconic works of engineering and urban design — Manhattan’s grid. The 1811 street layout was officially known as the Commissioners’ Plan, but its execution is really owed to John Randel, Jr., the plan’s chief surveyor and engineer, who endured — and persevered through — endless legal and physical challenges to imprinting his vision on what was, north of the burgeoning city, a wild, hilly, watery island.
Randel’s difficult (and often amusing) travails have been widely recounted elsewhere: he was, among other things, pelted with vegetables and even arrested for trespass in the course of carrying out the Commissioners’ scheme, which involved seizing property and, in the course of leveling hillsides, leaving some houses stranded on bluffs along his new avenues. The New York Times has a colorful story about him as part of a larger feature celebrating the grid — which, the paper proclaimed, had easily stood the test of time.
But what if Randel had encountered more propertyholders like Henry Brevoot? His obstinant refusal to part with his estate means that, to this day, you can’t walk the length of 11th Street uninterrupted — it doesn’t run between Broadway and Fourth Ave. Or what if the considerable engineering challenges his project faced — eight million cubic yards of dirt had to be moved from the future west side to fill in the valleys of the future east — simply couldn’t be overcome, either physically or financially?
There’s been plenty of aimless speculation over centuries as to what Manhattan would look like sans grid. Among the more tongue-in-cheek illustrations were Charles-Antoine Perrault and Alex Wallach’s views of what the island would look like if crisscrossed not by its grid, but by Paris’ medieval streets and strident boulevards. Cutting and pasting the Left Bank from one Google Earth grid to another didn’t exactly make for a perfect fit, but the idea that a gridless Manhattan may have developed in a similarly piecemeal, haphazard fashion — as it had, with farmers subdividing their land into individual, poorly meshing grids, until 1811 — makes sense.
But there was at least one serious master plan for Manhattan that predated the Commissioners’. Surviving in only a few rare maps (themselves mostly reproductions), it demonstrates that, had the Commissioners’ Plan not prevailed, New York could have been a considerably different place today.
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April 5th, 2011
Jean-Talon Station’s southwest exit in 2010
Rendering by MileEnd Design
The southwest exit of Montreal’s Jean-Talon metro station — a small but interesting specimen of contemporary architecture — is situated along Jean-Talon Street, at the end of a huge parking lot and between some commercial strips in need of renovation. In that situation, we can hardly tell the difference between the street itself and the parking lot; the sidewalks are invisible.
And yet this is the main exit one uses to reach Jean-Talon Market, one of the most famous landmarks in midtown Montreal. And the area’s density means that Jean-Talon is also a street often densely packed with commuters.
As part of a design exercise, we’ve been thinking about how we could transform this area without investing a significant amount of important resources, and in what way this could be done in the short term.
The simple solution we provide here is an outdoor café and terrace, where people could simply stop by for a drink or have something on their way to the office. The design of the public space suggested, using trees, plants and some furniture, helps structure the street itself. It is, as you can see, a basic concept that we prepared quickly to use as an example.
In light of this solution, do you think Montreal — or other cities — ought to invest resources in some similarly simple transformations ? Could our quality of life be significantly upgraded by little more than such simple urban design?
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March 18th, 2011
Photo by Sarah Carr
I couldn’t quite glimpse Hosni Mubarak from my balcony in Garden City, but simply knowing that his portrait was nearby made me unable to shake the sensation of being watched. Not exactly towering over, but nudged by its rooftop mechanicals above the rooflines of the neighborhood’s decadently decomposing 19th century apartment houses was its home, the khaki hulk of the Ministry of Social Solidarity — more Orwellian in name than purpose. Mounted on its façade, the multistory banner depicting the longtime Egyptian president — slumping, casually, in shades — was what really gave the place its authority. I never encountered a more affirming symbol of Mubarak’s power than his pose on that photo: the longstanding ruler was so calm, collected, comfortable.
Dictators survive by avoiding blame and instilling awe. Both served Mubarak well. Russian peasants were said to have hated the czar’s officials — who constantly interfered in their daily lives — but to have loved the distant czar, whom they imagined, were he in touch, would ultimately set their lives right. Perhaps that’s why it was relatively hard to find, in Cairo, many more of the trappings — monuments, murals, political paraphanelia — that mark personally invested, ideologically rigid, and, hence, vulnerable regimes. It’s possible that, walking through Bolshevik Petrograd or late Maoist Beijing, you could have somehow put the omnipresent slogans and statues out of your mind, but in Cairo there seemed to be far less need.
True, Mubarak’s visage still gazed out from many posters, murals, and portraits, but their relatively low degree of frequency reflected the fact that his regime was more of a shadowy, bandit kleptocracy than a mass-murderous personality cult. Every classroom in Egypt apparently had an image of the president mounted on its wall, but they must have only made the president appear as a fixed, unresponsive certainty of daily life, or else an image that would recede in memories as quickly as algebra and playground fights. Many of the old posters were already fading by themselves. The bridges, streets, and stations named after the former president made him seem like a figure from distant history rather than someone who could be held to the consent of the governed.
By refraining from stuffing itself into Egyptians’ fields of vision, the regime also ensured it did not become a default excuse for the sometimes crumbling condition of the country or its inhabitants’ stagnant fortunes. That few, casual images of Mubarak produced — such as the one that hung from the ministry — spoke volumes about his removal from the people. As the revolution that broke out in January helped attest, they made the old ruler seem out of touch. Their isolation, for the longest time, made him seem untouchable.
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