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.
Second in a series of three posts about Hong Kong’s waterfront. Read the first post here.
The Kwun Tong promenade opened last year on an industrial stretch of waterfront facing the runway of the old Kai Tak Airport. It’s very short — just 200 metres — but the plan is to continue expanding it until it joins whatever will be built along the waterfront of Kai Tak, which is on the verge of being redeveloped into a large residential and commercial area.
So far, what exists is promising. The design language takes its cues from the surrounding industrial blocks, with plenty of exposed steel that goes nicely with the wood boardwalk. Water vapour is released from vents inside the boardwalk, which is a nice cinematic touch, especially on a hazy winter day. On one end of the promenade is a sculpture inspired by the large bricks of paper that once occupied this stretch of waterfront, waiting to be loaded onto barges and shipped to China for recycling.
There isn’t much to do here but sit and admire the view. If the rest of the promenade turns out to be like this, it would be a problem. A whole kilometre of it would feel one-dimensional. But for the moment, it’s fine, because this is one of just a couple of places in East Kowloon where you can actually get close to the water.
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.
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.
Hong Kong people aren’t very sentimental, but when Chan Tsu-wing told me about his life as a coxswain, I noticed a certain wistfulness creep into in his words.
“I love my job — it gives me the best view of the city,” he said while piloting the 45-year-old Silver Star across Victoria Harbour. He waved a hand across the view of emerald water bracketed by skyscrapers and mountains. “Look at this. This is the best place in the world.”
Chan has crossed the harbour thousands of times in his 27-year career with the Star Ferry, shuttling generations of commuters and tourists between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, witnessing the city’s stranglehold on the harbour grow tighter every year.
When Chan first joined the Star Ferry in 1984, Victoria Harbour was nearly half a mile wider than it is today. Over the next two decades of his career, the water grew rougher and more polluted. Marine life all but vanished. Chan told me that he used to see dolphins in the harbour, but no more.
Ronnie Wong’s swimming career began with a dive into Victoria Harbour. In 1968, the 16-year-old competitive swimmer joined hundreds of other men and women in a 1.5-kilometre race from the Star Ferry pier in Tsim Sha Tsui to Queen’s Pier in Central.
“The moment I jumped in the water, I didn’t care about anything, just to head towards City Hall as fast as I could,” says Wong. He won the race. He won the following two years as well.
But the race, which had been launched in 1912, soon came to an end. By 1978, the harbour had become so polluted that the race was cancelled. In its final decade, Wong remembers the swim was as much of an obstacle course as it was a race. “The water was so dirty you would bump into a dead chicken or a piece of wood,” he says.
Harbour pollution continued to worsen in the 1980s. In 1988, fewer than half the city’s beaches were clean enough to swim. Locally-raised fish and oysters were so toxic the public was warned not to eat them. The “fragrant harbour,” as Hong Kong is known in Chinese, became notorious for the sickening stench of its waters.
Recently, however, things have begun to change. In the mid-2000s, Wong, who competed twice at the Olympics and is now the secretary of the Hong Kong Amateur Swimming Association, went diving in the harbour’s waters and noticed they seemed cleaner than before. “Before, you couldn’t even see a few feet in front of you, but now you can see three to four metres away,” he says.
It’s not hard to see why Kacey Wong‘s “Paddling Home” is one of the most popular installations at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. It’s a houseboat that looks just like a typical Hong Kong apartment, after all, and anyone who lives here can relate to it.
Wong has paid particular attention to detail, cladding his boat in chintzy pink tile (popular in the 1990s as a kind of postmodern nostalgia for the ’50s, he says) and giving it what is locally (but inaccurately) known as a “bay window,” a kind of projecting window box that saves developers money on floor space while including the area of the windowsill in an apartment’s square footage. Wong’s installation highlights the absurdity of the property game in Hong Kong, where real estate is business, politics and civic obsession all at once.
Tourists usually head to the Avenue of Stars to get their fix of Hong Kong’s famous skyline. But there’s an infinitely more rewarding alternative just a couple of kilometres to the west. Well off the sightseer’s radar and overlooked even by most locals, the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade offers an incomparable 360-degree view of Victoria Harbour and the dizzying skyscrapers that flank it.
In a way, West Kowloon is the culmination of a hundred-year trend in Hong Kong history: land reclamation. Much of the modern-day city is built on soil dumped into the harbour, but none of the past landfill projects compare to the vast scale of West Kowloon, which replaced several square kilometres of water with highways, railroads, malls, offices and apartment towers. There’s so much new land, in fact, that people are still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. That’s why, for the time being at least, a large swath of it remains vacant and undeveloped.
Nature has already made its introduction and much of the vacant land is covered in small trees and craggy brush. With waves crashing on one side and the hissing of cicadas on the other, the West Kowloon waterfront feels like an obscure bit of country shoreline — except for that panoramic view of Hong Kong’s glossy skyline, of course.
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