Neon’s Slow Exit from Hong Kong

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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Urban Pastoral

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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The Robson Street Lawn

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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Photos of the Week: Reflections in Transit

“Ghost train,” Vancouver, c_c_clason

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Elected by Ethnoburbia

Election results in Toronto in 2008 (top) and 2011 (bottom)
Red is Liberal, blue is Conservative, orange is NDP

Canada held its 41st federal election on Monday and the results have unleashed a seismic shift in the country’s political landscape. After two consecutive minority governments, the Conservatives have now won a majority. The left-wing NDP, a marginal party for much of its existence (it ran fifth for most of the 1990s), is now the Official Opposition.

Much attention is being paid to the massive surge of support for the NDP, especially in Quebec, where two decades of dominance by the Bloc fell victim to the “Orange Crush.” But Quebec is prone to political mood swings, and even as an NDP supporter, I’m sceptical that they will be able to maintain their current level of support until the next election. What I find especially remarkable about this election is the near-collapse of the Liberal Party — and the political rise of the ethnoburbs.

Take a look at electoral map of Greater Toronto. Red has given way to blue in virtually all of its fast-growing, immigrant-dominated, ethnically-diverse suburban areas. Losing these ridings is what pushed the Liberals to the edge of oblivion. “Of the 18 seats they gained in that region, 14 are more than 45 per cent immigrant, and most would not long ago have been considered un-winnable for the Conservatives,” notes the Globe and Mail.

In other words, the Canadian election was fought and won in ethnoburbia, the suburban immigrant enclaves first identified in 1997 by the geographer Wei Li. Ethnoburbs are socially and culturally self-contained, but unlike the urban ethnic enclaves of decades past, they are also prosperous and extensively connected to transnational networks. Their affluence and influence have given them enormous political leverage.

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How Canada Votes, Street by Street

Election signs in Calgary, 2006

Canada is in the midst of yet another federal election, one that will, if the current trends hold steady, result in a third minority government for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. It’s a pretty dismal state of affairs. But even the most delicious truffle looks like a turd, so things might still turn out well, especially if Canadians finally wake up and grow tired of having a petty tyrant as prime minister.

In the meantime, my friend Cedric Sam has created a pretty good way to kill time: Google Maps of 2008 federal election results based on data from each and every polling station in the country. Since each polling station serves no more than a few hundred voters, the level of detail is extraordinarily precise, especially in dense urban areas. You can check it out at the website of the Montreal newspaper La Presse, which has published the maps in English.

Sometimes the maps can be surprising. Who knew that the well-heeled streets of Outremont held so many NDP supporters, while the immigrant-dominated, working-class north end of Côte des Neiges was so heavily Liberal? Other times, it looks exactly the way you would expect: in Edmonton Strathcona, the densely-populated streets around Whyte Avenue and the University of Alberta voted NDP, while more suburban areas to the south and east voted Conservative. (The NDP won in both Outremont and Edmonton Strathcona.)

2008 results in Outremont, Montreal

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Vancouver’s Most Brilliant Public Space

Vancouver’s cityscape is defined not as much by gorgeous architecture or dynamic streetlife as by the natural beauty that surrounds it. You can’t escape the green mountains visible from every angle, the deep blue water that twinkles at the end of hilly streets, the Douglas Firs standing tall in front yards. Even the glass apartment towers that have become a symbol of the city’s progressive urbanism are designed less to shape the city than to facilitate the gaze beyond it.

It’s perfectly appropriate, then, that Vancouver’s greatest public space is not a street or a square but a beach. English Bay Beach, located next to downtown Vancouver, is a crescent sweep of sand with a view of the bay where George Vancouver met Dionisio Galiano in 1792. It is a natural gathering spot, located at the terminus of two commercial streets, near the entrance to Stanley Park. Here, the city doesn’t just brush up against the sea, it spills right into it.

A little over a century ago, the beach was littered with swimming shacks, holiday houses and hotels. A burly man from Barbados, Joe Fortes, made his home in a small beachside house, where he taught a generation of young Vancouverites to swim. He became the city’s first official lifeguard in 1901. After his death in 1922, the Vancouver parks board began buying up beachside properties in order to build a public open space. In 1989, 16 Chinese windmill palm trees were planted near the beach to give it a more tropical appearance, an experiment that has been so successful that another hundred palms have been added to the beachside promenade.

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Waiting to Cross the Street

Shinjuku, Tokyo

Robson Street, Vancouver

East Village, New York

One Minute in Little Vancouver

With the Olympics industry a-churning and global media attention now devoted to Vancouver, at least for the next two weeks, this tilt-shift time-lapse video might make a good introduction to the city for those who know nothing about it. Unfortunately, it lacks the wit and narrative drive of Keith Loutit’s similar videos of Sydney, and it’s little more than a tourist postcard, but it’s still fun to watch.

Shots and Corners

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Before I left Montreal, my geography geek friend Sam Imberman organized an event for all of the other geography geeks he knew. He called it “Shots and Corners.” For three hours, we walked through Little Italy, Outremont, Mile End and the Plateau to visit everyone’s favourite streetcorners.

We honoured each corner with a toast and a shot of various types of liquor. My corner was the intersection of Groll Avenue and the laneway between Esplanade and Jeanne-Mance, which I picked partly because I like the way it looks and partly because I’m the kind of annoying person who has a preference for the obscure. (My drink, in case you’re curious, was gin.)

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The City Speaks

Mount Royal Avenue, Montreal

Franck Chambrun seems to have rediscovered my photos. After painting several of them in 2007, he has done the same over the past few weeks, though with a distinct shift in style. Whereas his earlier paintings distilled the streetlife depicted in my photos to its bare essence of form and colour, his new works seem to read the city’s thoughts and emotions. Maybe it’s my own personal bias, but his paintings seem to have a greater impact when you see them in conjunction with the photos on which they were based; you get to peek inside the artist’s own mind, seeing what he saw.

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The Ethics of Urban Documentary

Vancouver is many things, but perhaps most of all it is Terminal City, a place to which people escape. Movie stars and Cantopop celebrities flee there to escape the stress of their lives in Hollywood and Hong Kong; the less affluent find in Vancouver a place to get away from the constraints and conventions of society. Two films produced by the National Film Board of Canada look at some of the city’s more vulnerable people and their attempts to escape — and they also raise questions about the ethical obligations that documentarians (and, by extension, journalists and other members of the media) must confront when dealing with marginalized people.

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Street Racing for the Penniless

The homeless guy pushing around a shopping cart full of bottles and cans is so well-entrenched in our imagination that it has become a bit of a stereotype. In cities with large concentrations of marginalized people, however, like Vancouver, they serve as a constant reminder of the dredges of the urban economy. When they are in such an unfortunate position, then, how can they assert themselves and make the city their own?

Carts of Darkness might shed some light on the answer. Former snowboarder and sports filmmaker Murray Siple turns his gaze to bottle-pickers in the suburbs of Vancouver’s North Shore who engage in an exhilarating and potentially lethal pastime: shopping cart racing. “I don’t have any furniture, I have no wife, I have no kids to look after, I got nothing,” says one of the characters in the film, explaining why he gets such a rush from something that could potentially take his life.

What seems particularly interesting about this in the context of urban space and social order is how unbelievably subversive cart racing is. Just imagine — grown men speeding down steep suburban streets in stolen shopping carts. It’s completely at odds with everything they are supposed to do and everything the environment around them tells them to do.

Redeeming the Vancouver Special

A block of Vancouver Specials. Photo by Jason Vanderhill

It usually takes a generation or two for maligned building styles to win new appreciation — or even any sort of appreciation at all. That’s certainly the case with the Vancouver Special, a ubiquitous type of house that has long been considered an eyesore for its bland features and repetitive nature. But its practicality has made it popular with generations of immigrants who have used them as stepping stones into homeownership. Now, finally, it seems to be earning a sort of grudging respect, if not outright admiration.

I like to think that the Special is a West Coast equivalent of Montreal’s plex; both emerged at a time when strict building codes tried to mitigate the impact of large population booms. In Montreal’s case, those codes were meant to improve living standards in a city where much of the population lived in dark, toilet-less apartments. In Vancouver, however, zoning laws were biased in favour of detached single-family homes in an attempt to maintain the city’s suburban character. The Special, with its shallow pitched roof and large front balcony, gave the appearance of being a single-family home, but its ground floor was designed to include an extra flat that could be rented out, a nice way for the upstairs owners to subsidize their mortgage.

Aesthetically, it’s hard to find many redeeming qualities in the Special—it is gangly and awkward, like a teenager after a growth spurt—but its simplicity, functionality and accessibility are earning it newfound respect. After all, cities need these kinds of houses. They’re residential workhorses, easy to build, easy to modify and well-suited to the diverse needs of a growing population.

In the most recent issue of Savfaire, a Vancouver-based zine, Keith Higgins writes about his obsession with photographing Vancouver Specials; he has shot at least 1,400. He’s at a loss as to why he started taking photos of them but he hints at their populist appeal and the way they reflect, like the famous Levittown houses, the people who have lived in them over the years. Each one of the Specials he photographs (in a style deliberately reminiscent of MLS listings and freebie real estate magazines) is fundamentally similar, but each reflects years of decades of occupancy in a way that more precious or more refined houses do not.