A Stroll in my Backyard

I last blogged in November. It's been so long.

I'm finally back home in Hong Kong and Andy's here to visit. Today we walked first from Causeway Bay to the Golden Bauhinia Plaza in Wanchai, and then roamed on foot from Central to Sai Wan via the Central-Mid-Levels escalators. The trudge took about 3 hours, but was a fruitful sociological voyage with some quality photos as proof.

It's a Sunday and Father's Day so it was more crowded than usual on the streets, but a special thing about Sundays in Hong Kong is the sudden appearance of a large Domestic Helper population. The group is overwhelmingly foreign and female, consisting mainly of Filipinas but with increasing numbers of Indonesians and Thais. On their day off, they pour out onto the streets to form their once-a-week community, conglomerating at the city's scarce public spaces, seeping into the nooks and crannies of Hong Kong's financial district, the place where their congregation causes the least nuisance.

The world-renowned HSBC bank design by Norman Foster includes a ground floor plaza open to public even when the bank is closed (a concept I took note of in my studio project). Consequently, the entire space is neatly populated every Sunday without fail, yet leaving ample pedestrian space for people like us to pass through. It's almost a sociological exhibition to stroll around Central on a Sunday.

The plaza space is theoretically lightened up by mirrors that direct sunlight through a giant atrium space, but I don't think I've ever seen it work very well. The idea seems similar to Solatube, a natural lighting solution for interiors that have few windows, but the latter seems more successful in its execution. Granted though, it is limited to structures that have a roof, not a privilege shared by many Hong Kong spaces.

As we moved further away from the glass and steel of the commercial district, we progressed from lumps of high-rises sprinkled with old buildings to conglomerates of tenement housing speckled with tall ugly beasts. The two extremes of Hong Kong architecture depict the severe and ongoing problem of income disparity in the city. Nonetheles, most HK people are lucky (relative to the world); most of them have a home, a job and enough to live on despite the minimal amount of social security support from the government.

Other urban problems persist. The lack of open/public/green space is a big issue that is difficult to tackle. Land is gold in this city. 7 million people occupy 1000 square kilometers, with three-quarters of that land actually being the country parks. Green oases are a breathing relief in this wonderful but suffocating concrete mess, but their future is bleak while the government envisions 10 million people to live in this city. That said, green parks or public plazas are rarely found and if so, only utilized by the elderly. The younger public clusters in air-conditioned malls (perhaps rightly so in the hot and humid weather), subconsciously engaging in conspicuous consumption.

This theory of leisure is shaped in large part by structural factors that are controlled disproportionately by politics and economics. You need a committed, charismatic and insistent political leader to fix this externality. Or instill a Pigovian subsidy for architectural designs that provide widely accessible open/green spaces. The sky is still visible, yet the concrete plague advances slowly but surely.

Perhaps we need to begin to follow in Chicago's footsteps.

(Not) All photos courtesy of Andy Chen.