Hong Kong’s Quest for the Ideal City: Biennales, Protests, and the Growing Gap With China

The latest edition of the Bi-city Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB) opened in December of 2013, with venues in Shekou, Shenzhen and Kwun Tong, Hong Kong — two former logistic and industrial hubs now undergoing massive transformation. It was the fourth joint-exposition of the series, and the first to run in both cities simultaneously. As the only global Biennale dedicated to “Urbanism,” it is intended to showcase ground-breaking design and research work on the fabric of our cities.

As part of the overall Bi-City coordination, the respective organizing committees of Shenzhen and Hong Kong agreed upon a unified basic theme: “城市边缘,” or, the “Urban Edge.” Together, the chosen sites and theme perhaps proved more apropos than even the organizers intended. As Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying cut the ribbon in Hong Kong, the Kwun Tong waterfront was engulfed by protestors, demonstrating against the government-led redevelopment of the neighbourhood. From large-scale planning to event-based promotion, all outside intervention has come to be seen as an existential threat to the informal creative industry clustered in Kwun Tong, therein illustrating the point that periphery is in the eye of the beholder.

Our curatorial team wanted to challenge the geographical implications of that given theme. We argued that the “urban edge” could just as well be at the centre of the city, whether considered traditionally as a boundary separating manmade and natural or instead as a line between cosmopolitan formal and vernacular informal. In truth, the city is not so readily and cleanly divided. Thereafter we reinterpreted the nominal edge as a threshold of experimentation, where a single shift changes the future of the city. As we developed this idea of edge as a tipping-point for the city’s development, and in light of how we might want exhibitors to respond projectively (rather than statically), the theme was refined into a question: “Beyond the Urban Edge: The Ideal City?” In this manner, each exhibit, each participant, could propose their own answer.

A wide range of mediums were employed by the respondents—full-scale prototypes, models, digital animation and projection, virtual reality, films, paintings, photography, hand drawings. An even wider range of topics were explored, representing each participant’s tipping-point issue.

In this way, we focused most heavily on the Urbanism part of the Biennale title, enlisting varied viewpoints from different disciplines, different generations, and different regions to speak on the future direction of cities. Through eighty exhibits and another ninety events, more than three hundred participants joined the discussion, from a mix of disciplines beyond architects — including research labs, artists, event-makers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and activists.

Given the usual professional navel-gazing of architecture-oriented events, you might ask why we were so focused on cities rather than buildings in the Biennale. Or, more simply, why Urbanism? Certainly the unique geographical context is a major factor, reflected within the very organization of the UABB, being a collaboration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The two mega-metropolises abut each other but continue to diverge culturally and philosophically, with respect to the design of the city. Across the border in mainland China, Urbanism has become a primary catchphrase, simultaneously an affliction and a remedy. In seemingly every single Chinese city and village, leaders and businessmen are talking about urbanization. It is seen as a continual process, continually discussed and implemented. The architects, planners, and urban designers are called upon to be innovators — not merely to solve problems, but create whole new frameworks for development. By contrast, Hong Kong sees itself as already urbanized, and its planners and architects enlisted solely to solve technical problems. Paradoxically then, in the sense of its attention to innovative and advanced urban development ideas, Hong Kong has fallen behind Chinese cities, including the Bi-City Biennale counterpart of Shenzhen.

This expanding chasm is reflected in the respective value placed on the Biennale itself by its hosts. In Shenzhen, a highly coordinated private and public partnership and the full weight of the local government was put behind the execution and the marketing of their side of the exposition. Full advantage was taken of the opportunity to use the Biennale itself as a vehicle for urbanization, through large scale renovation and re-programming of defunct infrastructure in Shekou. In ostensibly post-urbanized Hong Kong (despite a love for the pageantry of openings) the government has no such aspirations for the event. The highly fragmented bureaucracy instead hinders its realization. Despite numerous opportune examples of vacant or underused architecture across the city awaiting such an activation, from the long-dead Central Market to the comically empty Cruise Terminal and dozens in between, the staid status quo is retained through a mix of redtape and casual disregard.

This is not to say that Hong Kong need follow Shenzhen’s particular flavour of urbanism — the large scale redevelopment practices and megastructures of the mainland are not suitable to a city with Hong Kong’s cultural and historical thickness. It is instead the opportunity of urbanism, and the capability for innovation and re-activation that should be recognized — and celebrated. The outpouring of ideas from the Hong Kong community in contribution to the Biennale shows that these questions are relevant to the city, and that its citizens aspire to more than the plodding continuance of blind urban development.

In response to our own theme, we believe an ideal city is not a new and pure form, but an imperfect one. It is one that allows and celebrates flaws, has space for failure, room for dissent, flexibility for the unplanned. In the same way we prize the hand-hewn wood chair over the impeccably manufactured office chair, we should value cities for the marks of their humanity—reflecting the people that built it and occupy it. The patina of use lets you know a city is really alive. So, while it may be the impressive skyline of Victoria Harbour that announced the arrival of a global city, it is the continuance of Pokfulam Village that reminds you that the city has a history as well, a vibrance of vernacular to counter the aspirational office towers of new CBDs. The ideal city somehow finds a balance between the designed and the un-designed.

There’s a resonance across the Biennale’s venues and exhibitions about exploiting the bit of wiggle room in the cracks, and in the rebirth of underutilized and otherwise out-dated infrastructure in ways that require non-standard approaches. If allowed to grow from above, there are a multitude of ideas that can attempt to change the city from the bottom-up, using creative thinking to propose strategic solutions to guide the general public to change the city together. Just like acupuncture in Chinese medicine, when we treat the city as an organism, these “urban design thinkers” are able to figure out the specific point of intervention. The successful activation (if only temporary) of a nearly defunct ferry terminal building and reclaimed space beneath a flyover in Kwun Tong were themselves part of the urban design process, forcing a critical evaluation of the future “Ideal City” in Hong Kong.

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One half year ago we hoped the Biennale would be a first pin for urban acupuncture. Now, as yellow-umbrella’ed student protestors enter their second month occupying Central in demands for self-determination from Beijing, it is impossible not to see those first pricks in the skin of Hong Kong for what they really were—glimpses of the burgeoning resistance already underway, with or without our input, building energy for change. The bleeding edge of progress was not to be found, as the Biennale organizers anticipated, among the sprouting towers of property moguls at the outskirts of town. No, the tipping point for the Ideal City has found a fulcrum at the very heart of Hong Kong, where thousands of disillusioned youths hang desperately onto the end of its lever.

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Adapted from a SCMP: The Peak Magazine commissioned essay entitled “Bi-City Urbanism” [as yet unpublished] written by Tat Lam and Travis J M Bunt, Executive Curators for the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Hong Kong