Hong Kong

Here's a book review and interview from urbanphoto on navigating Hong Kong. As a student I was part of a case study on HK and the thing I remember most was there were no accurate maps of the island. We live in a mapped world - there are no blank spaces left for monsters and dragons. I expected to be able to find a map with a few minutes of Googling but there just aren't any. The island expands and reforms too fast to keep track of; by the time one map is finished the territory has already morphed into something else. Jonathan Soloman, Clara Wong, and Adam Frampton have taken a new approach to documenting the city - showing it in all its fabulous intricacy and three dimensionality - in their aptly titled Cities Without Ground. The plural is intriguing. I hope they tackle more cities but have difficulty thinking of another place so densely layered.

What makes HK unique, or at least extremely rare, is not just the density of its construction but the fact of its topography. The island is mostly composed of steep hills and was initially separated into zones, areas leveled for construction at different elevations. It's the interlocking of these previously separate elevations that generates HK's three dimensional complexity. As the density of the built environment increased the ground plain (the base elevation) became less and less significant.

HK is probably the biggest city in the world where cars aren't the dominant factor in urban planning. Part of the motivation for Cities Without Ground was the importance of pedestrian paths in successfully navigating HK. In Toronto, this factor is of negligible importance (as it is in almost all North American cities).

HK's three dimensionality is just one of the reasons I find the city fascinating. It is a cliche in North America that for every hour you travel off a main highway you also travel ten years back in time. This applies not only to social mores but to levels of technological sophistication and (most interesting for architects) the built environment. There was a scene in the TV series Heroes where two characters visit a small town in Texas. The Washington lobbyist remarks, "This looks like the kind of place I can get a good latte." Her associate replies, "There is a cafe down the road and I saw a cow on the outskirts of town."

"Backward" in this context means "behind the times". The implication is other places, typically cities, are current, with the times. I also take it to mean some places are "forward". A person from HK would see NYC as "backward". For a long time I have wanted to make a chronological map of the world, using location in time (rather than physical geography) as the basis for the structure. Places where people live as their ancestors have for thousands of years, and there are a lot of places like that, would be furthest in the past. Places where events are currently happening that will take years, or decades, to happen here are either the location of "now" or exist in the near future, depending on where the observer stands. What stops me is trying to invent a means to determine where "now" is - where the future arrives first. I don't know where that is at the moment; I do know it moves around.

Two thousand years ago Rome was the location of now. It was at least a millennium ahead of the rest of Europe, possibly more. Trying to create an index or set of criteria to determine where Rome stood, chronologically, compared to the major cities in China would be extremely difficult. Definitely beyond my current knowledge. But, confining myself to the "western World", Rome was it until 400 CE or so. Then things leveled out and all of Europe and the Mediterranean existed in the same now. They used the same technologies, the same economic systems, and social structures that were either similar or were coevals.

Starting around 1700 England began to pull itself into the future - or push the rest of Europe into the past. The phrasing gets awkward but it became the place events occurred that would take years, or decades to occur elsewhere. Then the locus of our connection to the future migrated to New York. And stayed there until it moved to Asia - maybe to Tokyo, maybe to HK.

So where is it now? Where is the place that not only looks on us as backward but on everyone else as well? HK? Shanghai? Singapore? I don't know. I'm not even sure what the dominant characteristic, the primary indication, of "now" should be. The most important, the signature, aspect of development is only revealed in hindsight. My map of the recent past suffers from the same problem as mapping HK - it cannot exist as an accurate depiction of "now" - it can only demonstrate conditions that no longer apply.