What are the requirements for creating the ideal city? The question is being considered at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (UABB). Sitting next to the Kwun Tong waterfront, with a hazy city skyline in the distance, a gathering of architects, designers and urban planners share their views. Christopher Dewolf reports.

"My ideal city is the city that supports people's emancipation," said Dutch architect Ole Bouman, who curated the Shenzhen side of the biennale. "(The ideal city) helps people make a life and then make something of that life."

Local architect John Ng gestured at the smog obscuring the view. "We've got to do something about this in order to get closer to the ideal city," he declared.

The next speaker was Peter Cookson Smith, an urban planner who has been involved in some of Hong Kong's biggest developments: planning the Sha Tin and Tai Po new towns in the 1970s. The ideal city, he said, "should have great streets and urban spaces. What always strikes me about Hong Kong is that 100 years ago, we actually had that. It was a very sustainable layout. Now where have we gone since then?" Unaffordable housing, income inequality, pollution - these are byproducts of the kind of development Hong Kong has followed in recent decades, he said. "That's why we have so much frustration in the community."

Those perspectives echo throughout the biennale, a gathering held every two years in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The current assembly, which continues until the end of February, features more than 80 exhibits and installations along the Kwun Tong waterfront. Throughout, runs the clearly perceptible sentiment, that today's Hong Kong is not working as it should. "For a long time, Hong Kong was seen as a kind of model, in terms of providing social housing, opportunities for economic advancement, but now a lot of people are missing out," said Colin Fournier, the biennale's lead curator. "The city of laissez-faire capitalism has done a lot of damage to nature, to people, and it's our responsibility as architects and planners to repair that damage."

But where does one begin just to look for the solution? "Look at the edge between what the city is and what the city will be," said Fournier. "At the edge, the old rules lose their hold, allowing the city to reinvent itself, redefine its values and create new forms.

In that sense, Kwun Tong is an apt setting for the biennale, serving as a bridge between Hong Kong's past, present and future. First developed in the 1950s as a waterfront industrial zone and working-class residential community, deindustrialization left many factory buildings empty, with much space available at low rent for design studios, art galleries, music venues, the kind of endeavors which transformed Kwun Tong into one of Hong Kong's leading creative clusters.

Whether that will continue to be the case is unclear. The government plans to transform the industrial area into a new, high-value office district called CBD2. Owners of the creative enterprises and their supporters are concerned that the local culture that has grown up here will merely be shoved aside through the redevelopment. The biennale itself has become swept up in the debate. Several participants actually withdrew from Biennale, in symbolic protest of the CBD2 plan. The heightened emotions surrounding the issue serves as a pointed reminder of just how contentious development in Hong Kong has become. The biennale's organizers say the exhibition is well positioned as a forum to discuss these thorny issues. "Citizens are concerned about the future - and the biennale offers people of different backgrounds a chance to come together and exchange their vision," said architect Bernard Lim, who heads the biennale's steering committee.

Meeting of minds

The biennale presents several, designated spaces meant to encourage discussion. One is "House of Red, House of Blue," a cocoon-like structure made of burnt wood by architect and artist Kacey Wong. "I wanted to create a place where people could meet quietly and have a greater understanding of what's going on," he said. To access the space, visitors must duck through one of two small entrances and make their way to an intimate inner chamber filled with tree trunks. Embedded in each of the tree trunks are books of history and political philosophy that span the ideological spectrum. Wong charred the wood as a symbolic representation of the social and political conflict gripping Hong Kong. "Fire brings transformation," he said. "It changes material, but if you're not careful, you get burned."

A few hundred meters away, a cluster of mahjong tables has been set up inside the Kwun Tong Ferry Pier. "Instead of the traditional round table, we have something more suited to Hong Kong," said Fournier. On a recent Sunday evening, a handful of people sat around one of the tables, chatting about how Hong Kong could develop without sacrificing its culture and heritage. Leading the discussion was Nigel Ko, a heritage conservationist who has been seeking to raise awareness about his native Pok Fu Lam Village, one of the few settlements on Hong Kong Island that predates the arrival of the British.

"The village has been under threat for 30 years," he said, outlining several attempts to redevelop the settlement. Pok Fu Lam Village is an indigenous community first settled in the 1600s. It was declared a squatter settlement in the 1980s. Residents were informed they could not make alterations to their houses. The place obviously appears shabby and rundown after years of legislated neglect but the village remains home to a tight-knit community. There are several historic structures, centuries-old houses, a Qing Dynasty pagoda and the remnants of Hong Kong's first dairy farm.

"This village has social value, historical value and cultural value," said Ko. "It has so many different layers of history. It's like a living museum of Hong Kong."

Historical value

Architect Tat Lam, one of the biennale's curators, chimed in: "A lot of places don't have historical value at all, but they become interesting when they are part of a community." The challenge, he said, is how to allow for the city to grow and evolve without obliterating social and cultural networks.

"We need our cities to provide for a variety of lifestyles," added Ko.

That sentiment is shared by many of the biennale's participants. Several take interest in the kind of grassroots, informal development found in places like Pok Fu Lam Village. "The New Walled City," an exhibit by architects Affect-T, explores how the legacy of the Kowloon Walled City - a massive, unregulated settlement that once housed 33,000 people in just 2.6 hectares - is carried on by the rooftop dwellings and illegally subdivided flats found throughout Hong Kong. The exhibit makes clear that these kinds of housing are at once a symptom of Hong Kong's affordable housing crisis and a kind of solution, since they allow poor families to live cheaply in the middle of the city.

Finding a better alternative to Hong Kong's notorious shoebox apartments is the goal of "Hong Kong Tower Revolution," an installation by University of Hong Kong architecture students. Using a typical Hong Kong cruciform apartment tower as their model, the students altered it to suit different lifestyles, with 30 proposals specializing in outdoor gardening space, communal kitchens or extra privacy. The towers the students proposed, serve to critique the default mode of Hong Kong growth, which forces residents to adapt to rigid spaces, a situation described by one architect as "one size fits nobody."

Other installations focus not on reshaping the built environment but on finding life between its cracks. University of Hong Kong architecture professor Tris Kee proposes a variety of ways to make use of the space beneath Hong Kong's many flyovers; some suggestions include performance space for musicians, affordable housing for young people and the elderly, public open space and homeless shelters. In "An Ideal For Living," non-profit design group HK Farm documents the ways it has encouraged urban agriculture in the leftover urban spaces around Yau Ma Tei.

"We're using urban agriculture as a vehicle to communicate larger social and cultural issues," said Michael Leung, one of the founders of HK Farm. "It encourages people to think about food origin, the use of public space, their neighborhood - there are so many areas in Hong Kong that have no neighborhood spirit."

Leung makes a point of planting a variety of crops in each container. He also installs beehives to pollinate plants and produce honey. It's a rejection of the commercial practice of mono-cropping. Leung sees it as a potent symbol for the ideal city, which exists not to extract as much value from land as possible, but to encourage a healthy and sustainable community of citizens.

"In ecology, there's something called the edge effect," in which the area on the border between different habitats is richest in biodiversity, said Leung. "There're a lot of parallels with architecture and urban planning, how cities should be built. That's the urban edge right there."

(HK Edition 01/03/2014 page5)