Sustainable Living Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s civil society is quite alert to the scams perpetrated by the government but, alas, also prone to being co-opted.

The government now knows the trick by heart. It works like this: when the public objects to a project, it would pick a detail or two of the criticism to do a bit of work on and offer a “public consultation” on its “response”. Once the “comments” are in, the government will then go ahead with the scheme, saying how it reflects public “aspirations”, or whatever. We may then stutter, angry at having been tricked, and yell about fake consultations at the next protest, but it works every time.

Remember how the public objected to the waste of taxpayers’ money on building a grandiose government office block on a prime waterfront site, on land reclaimed from the harbour? The government picked on the objection to obstruction of visual and air flow and promised to reduce the height of the building and ensure ventilation, then staged exhibitions of the revised submissions from the architects, with multiple choice comment cards: you could pick A, B or C, but you couldn’t say the whole idea of wasting all that money was wrong-headed in the first place. Checkmate.

What about the proposal to reclaim more land from the harbour to build another expressway? The public objected to the Central-Wanchai Bypass, with the more knowledgeable pointing out that it’d been demonstrated everywhere that more roads meant more cars and calling for the introduction of electronic road pricing. But the government picked on the objection that the waterfront should be a public amenity and not a road for speeding cars, and offered a choice of two options for a landscaped ventilation building for the public to choose from. It would probably get away with it too, except that this time it’s not so much the public but the developers behind the IFC that are upset about their expensive investment being blotted by this eyesore standing between their building and the harbour.

And now the West Kowloon Cultural District. I still remember the uproar that greeted Norman Foster’s initial design and trudging up the steps of the Fringe Club to view the alternative proposals put forward for enlivening the cultural landscape of the whole of Hong Kong, by having three key centres of cultural activities on both sides of the harbour. It made sense: after all, the Royal Opera House, V&A, Tate Modern, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, etc etc, aren’t all located at the Barbican Centre. They’re scattered all over London. And they were built on the foundations of a culturally informed city where Paul McCartney could busk (in disguise) in the Tube and jugglers are free to amuse themselves as well as spectators without being arrested by the police, as one was in Hong Kong recently, just before the government went ahead with a “six-month pilot scheme” to promote street performances, something artists and entertainers in London have been doing since at least the 19th century.

But instead of heeding the cry against this gigantic waste of public money, the government’s at it again, focusing on the objection to the real estate element in the initial design in order to push through with the legacy-obsessed concept of creating a cultural ‘destination’. Having got three big-name architects to come up with fancy proposals articulated with appealing spiel about ‘connectivity’, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusiveness’, etc etc, it now wants the public to effectively endorse the waste of money by visiting the exhibitions of the proposals and picking their favourites.

I have just a couple of questions: what do the government and the three architects know about climate change? How much carbon emissions will be generated by the construction of the West Kowloon Cultural District? What is the purpose of the cultural district: to serve up cultural events as consumer products for the elite, or to foster the creativity of the general public?

Climate change is likely to impose worse impact by the time this project was completed. Look how food prices have risen as a result of the flooding in China and the wild fires in Russia; when ordinary Hong Kongers can’t cope with food price inflation due to climate change, will the government say: let them eat cake while we build this edifice?

Theatre du Pif is back for another run of the play “The Will to Build”, which uses verbatim transcripts of interviews with real people who are intimately involved in and affected by the relentless cycles of construction and demolition in Hong Kong: property tycoons, construction workers, architects, planners, preservation activists, politicians, Feng Shui masters, former colonial dignitaries, cage-dwellers…

If you missed it last year, catch it this time. More details from Theatre du Pif’s website. They say they’ve added new materials for this year’s performances.

Today the government will propose to unveil the competing plans for West Kowloon in the middle of August, three months after they were received. Question remains why the public is left to wait. The Board is scheduled to see the three concept plans on July 5 in a closed-door meeting.

The physical models, computers with interactive 3D displays and screens with videos will be exhibited in public venues throughout Hong Kong including trucks parked in busy areas. Detailed information from the architects will be made available on-line.

A kick-off ceremony is scheduled to take place in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for invited media, arts and cultural groups. Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Rocco Yim will form a panel to answer questions during the event. It will be quite a show – with three competing teams of leading architects ready to dazzle Hong Kong.

The public will be able to submit their views at the roving exhibition, during forums and on-line between mid-August and mid-November 2010.

The details of the facilities (the Schedules of Accommodation) to be built in West Kowloon are delayed though. This may not be a bad thing. Concerns over the ‘all at once, all in one location’ development schedule have not gone away. Many are calling for phased decisions on the venues and gradual construction as a substitute for a market-led development to minimise the risk of getting it wrong.

The target remains to take the Development Plan to the Town Planning Board by end 2011. The opening of the first venues is expected in 2016, 18 years after the Study of Cultural Facilities by Roger Tym & Partners.

Further info:

• Arrangements for the kick off, exhibition and public engagement
• 28 June 2010: Papers for the 5th Meeting of the Consultation Panel of WKCDA
• Study of Cultural Facilities by Roger Tym & Partners (1998/1999)

Best-estimate verdict of the conceptual plans submitted mid-May by the three architects for West Kowloon. The cost of each concept plan is HK$50mil.

The concept plans for West Kowloon were submitted to the government in the middle of May. Yesterday, Koolhaas, Foster and Rocco explained their concepts privately to Henry Tang with models placed in three separate rooms in the Central Government Offices.

Whether the first verdicts – best-estimates based on all limited strings of available information – are correct is for the public to decide. And here lies the problem. The secrecy is set to continue. On July 5, the presentation by the architects to the Board of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) will be behind closed doors.

Why all this secrecy? The public pays for the designs and has a right to see the presentations and hear the comments and questions from the Board first hand. The continuing delay in letting the public see the designs only opens the door to suggestions thet efforts are being made to engineer the public consultation to produce the preferred (safe and boring?) outcome.

How about the Tsimshatsui Star Ferry Piazza?  The designs for West Kowloon are not the only ones witheld from the public. The first entries for the design competition for the Star Ferry Piazza in Tsimshatsui were submitted more than ONE YEAR ago. Not a word has been uttered on the progress. The public (and contenders) are left in the dark.

That’s the hope, anyway. But judging by the eagerness with which Hong Kong’s top brass watches the emergence of their ‘iconic’ new headquarters at Tamar and insistence on proceeding with building an ‘art destination’ in West Kowloon, the message hasn’t sunk in in this part of the world yet.

“The Bilbao Effect” is a play, now on in New York, that satirises the obsession with edifices designed by star architects. The recession in the west has, thankfully, put paid to this trend, with architects from Rem Koolhaas to Frank Gehry – he of the Guggenheim Bilbao fame – having to tone down their designs or make way for young architects who are expected to collaborate and come up with something functional.

What a pity, then, that egos in this part of the world are still insisting on their landmarks. Only a few months ago someone suggested that I should write something about the Burj Khalifa in Dubai because, to her edifice-trained eyes, it was such a fantastic building. I did as suggested – by highlighting what the president of the German architects’ association, Christian Baumgart, said about it, that it was a “pointless” symbol of power and prestige that has no place in a world that calls for sustainable buildings.

Back to West Kowloon. Why is the project still entrusted to star architects – namely, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas and Rocco Yim? Are homegrown up-and-coming architects not good enough to produce something decent? Now that incentives are being offered for the conversion of old industrial buildings for commercial or creative use, why still this obsession with the creation of a brand new ‘destination’?

Speaking of which, former Tate Modern director Lars Nittve has been tapped to head the M+ museum in West Kowloon (yes, Tate Modern, the hugely successful converted power station; a new build it ain’t). Like Graham Sheffield, Nittve concedes that he knows nothing about the local arts scene, but that’s not the only problem, the more serious one being the vast difference, in terms of maturity, between the arts scene in London and the one in Hong Kong.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of a chunk of fancy concrete facing the harbour, we get a proper park instead while old industrial districts get their makeover as artists’ villages and museum quarters, so this “arts scene” gets a chance of developing?  Or are we looking at a cultural version of prêt-à-porter for the nouveau riche of China?

The newly-minted chief executive of the West Kowloon Cultural District comes with an impressive CV, having overseen London’s Barbican for 15 years.

Although he readily admits that he will need the support of a local team to get him up to speed, there are bound to be enormous obstacles in that Hong Kong has nothing like London’s mature and vibrant art scene. While London has a plinth in Trafalgar Square on which performance art, including ones delivered in the nude, is allowed, in Hong Kong we only go as far as Le French May exhibitions of French masters that feature two samples each of the artists’ second-rate work.

Patronage is important to the arts everywhere, but whereas patrons elsewhere are typically lovers of the art forms they support, here they are patrons often only because they “gain face” by doing so. They have to be seen, for example, at a Li Yundi or Yo-Yo Ma concert, not because they know anything about Chopin or Bach. Come the interval, and they’d pile out the nearest exits, never to return; which is always frustrating for genuine music lovers who can’t get tickets to these shows because of the seats reserved for these VIPs.

Interestingly, the person previously appointed chief executive of the district – and who resigned before he took up the post – has a background in construction and project management. So the government has performed quite a circus act, having swung from one extreme to the other.

It can be argued that his resignation is a good thing, that it allows the government to appoint someone who will focus on the software rather than the hardware of making the district work. But then comes the question: why do we need a new “cultural district” at all?

Show something slightly different from the ordinary fare – like a performance by a countertenor (Andreas Scholl) – and even the ever-popular Hong Kong Arts Festival has difficulty filling up a small venue. How does the government propose to fill the expensive hardware to be erected in West Kowloon?

With Louis Vuitton-obsessed mainlanders, apparently, bless their white cotton socks.

Sometimes local circumstances may inadvertently dull one’s thinking about an issue by silently removing possibilities that “don’t fit” the local context from consideration. Only in hindsight are we able to see clearly the constraints of tunnel vision.

On a societal level, the failure to look “outside of the box” can be damning. Indeed countries go through decades or even centuries of toil because they failed to see that in most cases, what are presented as “unmovables” (e.g. the monarchy, the economic system, or the dominance of a landlord) actually could be moved if enough people agitated and demanded it.  Indeed the greatest advancements in science, history,  social development, and economy are made by people who disregard these so-called unmovables, and instead design without artificial constraints.

We in Hong Kong might heed these lessons, distant as they may seem, because we are forever hearing that ideas that seem to be in the interests of the general community cannot be implemented because of one or another constraint which somehow escapes questioning.  The most commonly cited constraint is the profit allocated to the corporate sector, i.e. the unmovable notion that companies have an inalienable right to enjoy a certain amount of profit even if it comes at the expense of the larger public.

So we are told that the government cannot raise air quality standards to be in line with other advanced industrial countries because it would impose too many costs on transport companies. Nor can the government require developers to be honest about the dimensions and characteristics of new apartments for sale because to do so would “interfere” with the developers’ right to “self-regulate.”  Nor can the government create adequate public space and greenery because to do so would infringe on the rights of developers to make profits from that land.

In each case, the “unmovable” is the right of the private sector to make profit.  But why should it remain off-limits?  Indeed, the question becomes even more relevant if the refusal to question such “taboo” issues is inhibiting social progress.

Basic reasoning– backed up by reams of studies – would tell us that poor air quality, high housing costs, and lack of public space decrease the general public’s quality of life and impose higher costs on those at the bottom strata of society.  Given this, a responsible government – ie. one that protects the right of citizens to pursue life, liberty and happiness — should take action, unless it is held captive by other interests.

All of the proposals cited above have been implemented to great social benefit in other advanced industrial societies and even in countries that are far less developed than Hong Kong.  And yet the HK government tells us that these are unworkable due to our special circumstances.

We know what the taboo issues are.  Let’s at least have an open debate about them.

What a surprise to be treated to such a delightful pantomime of Hong Kong’s problem in miniature at the Cultural Centre concert hall.

No, it wasn’t another satire staged by Zuni Icosahedron. It was a concert by Ojos de Brujo, a Spanish band from Barcelona that plays quite an energetic blend of flamenco, jazz, hip hop, Hindi and much more besides.

There they were on stage, singing about social justice with an infectious rhythm that quickly whipped the audience into a sea of gyrating bodies. The singer and scratch artist were waving with open palms, inviting the audience to get up and dance. And despite the setting, many did, only for the ushers, apparently cousins of the Hong Kong police, to firmly move them off the aisles and back to their seats.

Sold on the word ‘flamenco’ and expecting something suitably high-brow, only to find themselves in the midst of young and not-so-young things too eager to participate, middle-aged and besuited husbands, with their Prada-clad tai-tai wives in tow, beat a hasty retreat.

By the end the ushers conceded defeat: the singer had got half a dozen banned dancers onto the stage to join the band and everybody had risen and, on or off the aisles, they were jiving, waving, celebrating.

There’s a slight marketing issue here: well done to the organiser for bringing the band to Hong Kong, but evidently quite a number of people had completely misunderstood what this band was about. Good thing the Hong Kong Arts Festival is not a bank; else the Securities and Futures Commission might be on its case for misselling!

The Central & Western Concern Group urges people to object to a proposal by Sino Land to rezone 20-26 Staunton Street to 33-storey hotel. You can find detailed information on their website.

The group argues that SoHo is part of Hong Kong’s low-rise ‘Old City’ with a unique residential and entertainment ambience and many heritage sites including the Central Police Station Complex. With the existing density of Central and Mid-levels – and chronic traffic problems, lack of vehicular access, overcrowded narrow footpaths, lack of open space and green areas – who, in their right mind, would permit a 33-storey hotel on Staunton Street?

When is this nonsense going to stop? Deadline: 7 August 2009

If you know how it works – you can go directly to the website of the Town Planning Board – planning application number A/H3/390.

State clearly in the comments box that ‘I/We object to this application as the proposed use, bulk and intensity of the site is unsuitable for the area.’

And then pray for sanity.

Even as the company continues the protracted process of defying public opinion and pushing on with its plans to build a traffic-choking, out-of-scale skyscraper in Wanchai, the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) has announced Hopewell Holdings, along with Sino Land, as the winner of the bid to redevelop Wedding Card/Lee Tung Street.

“We hope to use our experience in heritage conservation and green development, to highlight the unique characteristics of the area by incorporating redevelopment, conservation and revitalisation elements,” Hopewell co-managing director Thomas Wu said in a statement.

With a straight face.

According to the URA, the project covers a site area of about 88,500 square feet and upon completion, will have about 835,000 square feet of gross floor area. What plot ratio does that give you​​?? Don’t be so surprised.

Hong Kong’s full of these fiefdoms and developers have so much power that even the Council for Sustainable Development’s green building consultation does not touch their prerogative to shape the city in their single-bottom-line – ie. profit – image. ‘Sustainable development’ according to the triple bottom line of social, environmental and economic considerations? Forget it.

The devil’s in the brief, and the consultation’s assumption is simply that they will go on destroying local communities and provide living environments that Hong Kongers, shorn of alternatives, have been trained to accept with enthusiasm.

As I said in the previous post, the narrow focus on GFA concessions, energy efficiency, etc, will not address issues of community vibrancy and the widening wealth gap. This is not just a matter of green building: research by two British epidemiologists has demonstrated that economies with the widest gulf between the rich and poor suffer the highest incidences of health and social problems. Read their book, The Spirit Level, if you want to know more about this.

In Hong Kong, the wealth gap has been exacerbated by the stranglehold property developers have on the economy. Yet, rather than doing something about it, the situation has been allowed to get so out of hand a developer can threaten legislators with a judicial review if called upon to testify in a hearing. It really is a mystery how the city has come to be identified as the world’s freest economy.