120928.001 by Adam Nowek
In a previous article of mine, I lauded Hong Kong’s hyperdense architecture as an appropriate design strategy for the city’s housing needs. The point remains true: good architectural design responds to a problem in a way that mitigates extant problems and addresses future need. Cities, and the architects and urban planners that design them, need to be resilient and adaptive, demonstrating a forward-thinking approach that considers long-term necessities for the urbanscape.
But are these toothpick-thin towers the true answer to what ails Hong Kong?
These towers, ubiquitous and densely packed into the fabric of the city, resemble incense sticks stuck vertically into a pile of sand. It’s precisely the reason that foreign travellers are warned against resting their chopsticks vertically in a bowl of rice: the sight of incense in this way is immediately reminiscent of Chinese funeral rites, wherein incense is burned to mourn the dead. And it’s perhaps an apt metaphor for contemporary urban development in Hong Kong.
120928.005 by Adam Nowek
Urban development patterns in Hong Kong are predicated upon claims that land cannot be developed upon. Indeed, 40% of Hong Kong’s land area is protected from development as natural reserves. While this is a laudable achievement for one of the world’s most densely populated metropolitan regions, cynics would suggest that the Government of Hong Kong merely views the currently undeveloped land as an asset to be sold to land holding firms for high-rise development in the future. While perhaps unfounded claims, the arrests of Raymond and Thomas Kwok, a pair of Hong Kong businessmen that lead the city’s most prolific real estate firm, in March 2012 gives any rational observer of Hong Kong politics reasonable suspicion to suspect continued corruption involving government and real estate in the city.
121011.001 by Adam Nowek
Hong Kong’s falsely-inflated land shortage thereby stimulates developers to suggest the necessity of extremely dense residential spaces. Photographer Michael Wolf portrays the ‘architecture of density’ in Hong Kong, showcasing the monotony of Hong Kong’s high-rise living. Other work of Wolf’s shows the living conditions and limited space of much of Hong Kong’s high-rise apartments: residents are packed into compartmentalised apartments (with occasional bursts of innovation) that achieve profit maximisation rather than harmonious living spaces. The hyperdensity reduces the sense of community, the sense of place, and the sense of belonging of residents.
This suggests that Hong Kong merely requires more space to develop residential areas, perhaps modelled more similarly to Vancouver’s slender tower-and-podium model to minimise the impact of high-density space. Of course, this requires both a reduction in the proportion of protected natural areas and a significant reduction in in-migration from Mainland China: needless to say, both of these are untenable decisions with major negative political, environmental, and moral consequences.
121109.001 by Adam Nowek
As the demand for housing in Hong Kong continues to rise with diminishing land supply, Hong Kong’s toothpick high-rise apartment buildings serve as an indicator of a city caught in the middle of forces competing for control over the city’s housing market: sustainable urban development, tenuous migration law, and profit-maximising real estate firms. As the debate rages, the incense will only continue to burn.
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