Tokyo defines concrete jungle: over 2,000 square kilometers of closely-packed, largely monochrome buildings set amid a tangle of clogged, winding roads, elevated highways, rail lines, and telephone wires. For many who are lost amid the ceaseless forward march of its sidewalks and churning perambulations in the corridors of its vast train stations, cafes perched several stories above the street — often, to further their escapist appeal, sporting French or Italian themes — offer rare opportunities to step back from the city’s omnipresent crowds and inexorable movement.
As much as they are respites from urban intensity, these perches also provide the best means to gain some perspective on the unwieldy metropolis. Their patrons may appear trapped in tiny windows when viewed from the street below, but they offer a scattered audience cheap, upper-balcony tickets to the spectacle of the city — itself snarled, not just in traffic, but anxiety and routine.
There’s nothing particularly special about this building. Built in the 1970s, it’s a highrise like any other, with a handful of small flats on each floor. None of the apartments have balconies; there is no club house or swimming pool; the only bit of shared space, beyond the dimly-lit concrete corridors, is the rooftop, which is divided into two narrow platforms on either side of the elevator’s machine room. Laundry lines crisscross the roof, but on a drizzly night, there are no clothes to be seen.
The view from here is attractive because of its ordinariness. Below is a brightly-lit football pitch, the sound of whistles and shouts echoing off the walls of surrounding buildings. To the south, apartment buildings jostle for space on the Mid-Levels, each trying to climb higher than the next in a quest for sea views. Exhausted, they pause for respite halfway up the dark, looming mass of Victoria Peak. To the east, IFC makes an appearance in the narrow gap between towers.
The glow of apartment windows stirs voyeuristic curiosity. In one, cool flourescents illuminate a dingy kitchen. Another window reveals a posh living room filled with art. Each is a portal into another Hong Kong, another set of lives, another set of stories.
Here on Peng Chau, thirty-five minutes by ferry from Central, the city is but a distant memory, a row of skyscrapers on the horizon. I make my way through sleepy streets to the tallest building on the island, a seven-storey apartment block. It has no guards and no doors to prevent entry to its upper floors. I walk up past the sounds of children playing and dinners being cooked behind closed doors.
When I emerge onto the roof, stepping out into brilliant sunshine, I’m greeted by a sweeping view of the entire island. Village houses sweep up the surrounding hills like waves on a beach. I can see the ferry pier where I arrived, the French café near the main square, the beach lined by wooden fishing boats.
Wah Luen is the cheapest building in Fotan, an out-of-the-way industrial district near Shatin. Since the early 2000s, it has become the epicentre of an artists’ colony populated largely by graduates of the nearby Chinese University. About 100 artists live and work in the area, most of them in high-ceilinged studios in the Wah Luen Centre, a brooding hulk of a building whose floors are always slippery from sausage factories.
On the building’s large, bleak rooftop, which is crisscrossed by rusty pipes and pockmarked by mysterious caged enclosures, it becomes clear just how odd the Wah Luen’s setting really is — an outpost of industry surrounded, rather improbably, by verdant hills. Standing towards the hills, your field of vision is occupied by greenery and small village houses, but your ears ring with the sound of distant machinery and the beep-beep-beep of delivery trucks backing out of loading bays.
Occasionally, there are reminders of the building’s newfound artistic vocation. The last time I visited, on a sullen grey afternoon, a pile of cement bricks had been cryptically arranged like a miniature Stonehenge. I’m not sure if it was the work of one of Wah Luen’s resident artists or a wistful elevator mechanic. Who knows.
Forty years might not even be close to a lifetime for most people, but in Hong Kong, it’s enough to witness the birth and death of a neighbourhood.
In the mid-1960s, when Cheung Cheuk-kuen and his wife, Cheung Tsui-lin, moved into a flat on the top floor of a building in Kwun Tong, it was a typically bright, spacious place, newly built to accommodate Hong Kong’s postwar surge of population. Their life was comfortable; Mr. Cheung owned a restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui. In the 1970s, though, the restaurant began to attract gang members and Cheung decided it had become unsafe. He sold it and decided to earn a living by renting out his flat to tenants. He built cage homes in the living room and wood houses on the roof.
Now the whole neighbourhood is condemned, waiting to be demolished for a HK$30-billion redevelopment of Kwun Tong’s town centre. The Cheungs, who are in their late 80s, are some of the only remaining residents in their building. Mrs. Cheung suffered a stroke and can longer walk, so she spends her days in a wheelchair on the roof. “It’s better to stay up here where there’s more room and fresh air,” says Mr. Cheung. The roof is surprisingly quiet; only the occasional horn and the rattle of passing MTR trains serve as reminders of the busy streets below.
Eddie Lui looks out from atop the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, leaning on a cane, contemplating the scene before him. He waves his hand out towards the old housing estates of Shek Kip Mei, their pale yellow paint dulled by the grey skies and damp air.
“This is a space where you can really communicate with the vicinity,” he says. “You can see the evolution of public housing and the surrounding area. It shows you how we came into being.”
It has been a year and a half since the abandoned factory building on Pak Tin Street was converted into the JCCAC, a collection of artists’ studios, art galleries, cafés and performance spaces. Lui, the centre’s executive director, led the transformation. Though its location has been criticized as out-of-the-way by some members of the Central-focused art crowd, the JCCAC is beginning to forge a relationship with its neighbours in Shek Kip Mei. In the afternoon, old men read newspapers in the centre’s atrium and teenagers head up to the roof after school.
The roof is central to Lui’s plans for the JCCAC. He has covered part of it in a layer of hardy plants that help insulate the building. Two stages have been built on the roof, used for theatrical performances and rehersals. The centre’s artists have held a barbecue party on the roof. There are even plans to use it for film screenings. “We could show experimental movies or something like that,” says Lui, pointing to an open space that he says could fit about 70 people.
The tong lau on Russell Street, across from Times Square, is not in the best shape. Walking upstairs from the street, I pass a bookstore and a hair salon; after the third floor, the shops give way to apartments and the stairwell becomes filled with rubbish, its tiles stained by years of grime. By the time I reach the top, I have to step over piles of construction debris just to get outside.
But I’m here precisely because this building has been overlooked: its roof is now covered in graffiti. Compared to many other cities around the world, graffiti and street art are still fairly uncommon in Hong Kong, and rooftops like this give artists a kind of sketch pad on which to practice away from the eyes of the public. There are lots of tags, but also some work by the city’s best-known street artists, Graphic Airlines — whose chubby-faced characters are now as common in galleries as they are on the street — and Start from Zero, whose preferred media include stickers and wheatpaste.
There’s more up here than just graffiti. From here, I can peer behind the giant billboards that face Times Square; I’m surprised to see they are propped up by bamboo scaffolding. I would have expected something more elaborate and permanent, but perhaps bamboo allows the billboard to be easily dismantled in case the market for luxury watches and designer handbags collapses. It seems a fitting irony: the city’s corporate advertising is supported by traditional craftsmanship, its presence as fleeting and ephemeral as graffiti that is painted over or worn away by the sun.
Hong Kong’s vertical urbanity was already taking shape by the mid-1960s, but as this 1966 aerial photo of Wan Chai shows, it still retained a bit of its earlier Southeast Asian character with rows of pitched-roof shophouses. The older parts of Guangzhou, Macau, Taipei and Bangkok still look like this today.
To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies are ever lost, and — since they’re also immune from central London’s congestion charge or from restrictions on private vehicles in places like busy Oxford Street — the patterns driven by the city’s trademark black cabs probably reflect the overall distribution of street traffic in the British capital better than any other proxy.
Part of the BBC’s visually absorbing Britain from Above series, which also includes this mesmerizing time-lapse of Britain’s busiest rail station, the video above examines the patterns tread by London’s taxis over the course of a day by combining GPS data about their location with satellite imagery of the city, telling the story of Londoners’ movements by tracing their routes in light.
Last October I moved to a new apartment — and with a new apartment comes to a new roof to explore. Unfortunately, my new building’s rooftop is far from spacious, with just two narrow platforms accessible through the fire stairs. Ladders lead up to two higher platforms, one atop the elevator shaft and another on top of what I assume is the water tank. The only things up there are satellite dishes, antennae and mobile phone receptors, which makes for a kind of depressing space. There isn’t even room to dry laundry.
There are, however, some pretty good views. To the east, there’s Langham Place and the highrise jungle of central Mongkok. To the east, there’s a view down Argyle Street towards Ma On Shan, one of Hong Kong’s tallest peaks, and to the west, a view over the Diocesan Boys’ School towards Kowloon Tong and the Lion Rock.
Before I moved from the Flower Market to Homantin last year, I went up to my building’s rooftop for a few last photos of the view, which gave out onto the towers of Mongkok on one side and the mountains north of Kowloon on the other.
Satellite views of California City (above) and Lehigh Acres (below) from Google Maps
The world is filled with mad dreams only partly come to life. In Eastern Europe, half-built skyscrapers that neither communist governments nor their free market-friendly successors could complete form ironic landmarks, totems of ideological overconfidence. In China’s Inner Mongolia province, authorities built a whole city to boost the country’s GDP — that no one could afford to live in. And vast, empty grids etch the surface of the United States: the hidden ruins of capitalism’s most spectacular failures.
Fly out of Fort Myers at dusk, catching the glint of the setting sun on the vast grid of streets stretching across the marshlands to its east and you may come to understand the level of ambition that led the airport you just left to be grandly styled “Southwest Florida International”. This is Lehigh Acres, quickly becoming America’s most notorious — if not its first — suburban ghost town.
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