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.
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.
People living near Hong Kong’s massive container port are being subjected to life-threatening levels of sulphur dioxide, says the author of a new government report on marine pollution that will be released later this year.
Scientists, environmentalists and even the shipping industry accuse the Hong Kong government of dragging its feet in regulating pollution from container ships and other ocean vessels, putting at risk the heath of thousands of people living in portside areas like Kwai Chung and Tsing Yi.
“It’s a very big health threat,” said Hong Kong University of Science and Technology visiting scholar Simon Ng Ka-wing, who is working on a report on marine emissions for the government’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD). “At the moment, many people living in Kwai Chung don’t even know that shipping emissions are harming their health.”
According to an index developed by University of Hong Kong public health professor Anthony Hedley, Hong Kong’s air pollution kills between 1,000 and 2,000 people a year. About a third of those deaths can be directly attributed to shipping emissions, based on studies conducted after the government legislated low-sulphur fuel for road vehicles in the 1990s.
“If you have grown up in highly polluted air, you will likely have lower levels of lung function, which will expose you to a higher risk of heart and lung disease and premature death,” said Hedley. “We are stacking up a great deal of problems for many children growing up in Hong Kong’s environment because the pollution levels are so very high.”
On a pleasantly warm evening last November, my thoughts wandered over to the nighttime activity at the Sai Wan pier and I wondered if the same sort of thing happened at the nearest bit of waterfront to my apartment, the New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter. I grabbed my camera, stepped out of the door, and twenty-five minutes later — after walking through the crowded streets of Mongkok, over a series of footbridges and past the gigantic housing estates near Olympic MTR station — I reached the water.
A couple of dozen people milled about. There were teenagers sitting by the water’s edge, legs dangling off the concrete seawall. Middle-aged couples strolled hand-in-hand down the waterfront promenade. A few elderly people swung their arms, walking backwards, doing strange old-people exercises. Next to the water’s edge were a few small boats, their engines running, operators sitting onboard, killing time. Every so often, one of the boats would leave the typhoon shelter and return with a single passenger.
The New Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter seems a poor heir to the sensational legacy of its predecessor. First opened in 1916, the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter was designed to protect Kowloon’s fishing boats from heavy summer waves, but it also sheltered a thriving community of Tanka people, who had made their livings in the coastal seas of South China for generations. They had their own language, their own food and their own wedding rituals, all of which, naturally enough, were centred around the sea. For centuries, they were considered non-Chinese barbarians by land-dwellers, and it wasn’t until 1731 that the Chinese emperor emancipated them from this status. But they still suffered discrimination whenever they set foot on land, so they continued to live most of their lives at sea.
At the southeastern corner of Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood — the cape that put the Hoek in the area’s original Dutch name, Roode Hoek — almost nothing is used according to its original purpose. A rail barge has been repurposed as a waterfront museum, a warehouse has become a massive Fairway supermarket, some streetcar tracks have become a waterfront promenade, and a solitary rowhouse has been refitted as a shrine to nauticalia that would not look out of place in a New England fishing village. Recently, one of its old docks was even restored to working condition — as Brooklyn’s first cruise terminal.
Creative reuse is almost the rule here — with one exception. A pair of mid-20th century streetcars sits, rusting and abandoned, between the repurposed warehouses and the reclaimed promenade, seeming like a fossilizing fragment of a network that once covered the entire borough.
Like the Saint-Laurent, Vancouver’s Fraser is a workhorse of a river. Industrial islands and seemingly endless log booms make for an interesting and active landscape, very different from the bulk of imagery one typically sees of Vancouver’s waterfront. These photos were taken from above in November, 2007.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 7 hours agofrom web
why does it now take decades to build subways in developed world cities, while china builds several a year? a summary http://t.co/VpgYJJ1Vabout 14 hours agofrom web
