Hong Kong Spatial Constructs As Narratives
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P. Rajagopalan and M.M Andamon (eds.), Engaging Architectural Science: Meeting the Challenges of Higher Density: 52nd 753 International Conference of the Architectural Science Association 2018, pp.753–759. ©2018, The Architectural Science Association and RMIT University, Australia. Learning from dense cities: Hong Kong spatial constructs as narratives Guillermo Aranda-Mena RMIT, Melbourne, Australia [email protected] Per-Johan Dahl Lund University Department of Architecture and the Built Environment [email protected] Caroline Dahl Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences [email protected] Abstract: Cities all over the world are being densified in the quest for sustainable urban development. Whether or not this is a viable strategy is an ongoing debate, but as densifying cities face certain challenges, they can learn from already dense cities, where interactions between interior and exterior space are explicit. This paper takes Hong Kong as a model for the densifying city to focus on three levels of spatial organisation in hyper-dense urban space. The paper will discuss urban life forms through seamless interconnection between interior and exterior space. Using a micro-narrative methodology for organising personal experiences and communication data, the paper will take the interior workplace, porous urban space, and the urban landscape as three conditions for dense urbanism. The paper will deploy Hong Kong as an in intellectual framework and model for spatial design and construction in high density; it will explore three levels of space through micro-narratives; cross-analyse the micro-narratives to detect attributes and concepts for densification; and synthesise the findings to suggest directions for further research. Keywords: city spatial organisation, high-density living, micro-narrative 1. HIGH-DENSITY IS HERE TO STAY According to the UN World Urbanisation Prospects (DESA-UN, 2014), 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanisation combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to the urban population by 2050. Cities are growing at a rapid pace in developed and developing economies, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa. Rem Koolhaas (1978) reflected on density when writing his seminal book Delirious New York: “Manhattan is the one urbanist ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendours and miseries of the metropolitan condition – hyper-density – without once losing faith in it as a basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.” The book was set as a blueprint for a “Culture of Congestion” (Koolhaas 1978, 10). Large cities will continue to expand in population. By 2030, Tokyo will lead the UN’s ranking of most populous cities with nearly 38 million people, followed by Delhi, Shanghai, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Mumbai, each with over 30 million people. On the other hand, small cities are more numerous: nearly half of the world’s 3.9 billion urban dwellers reside in relatively small settlements with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, while only around one in eight live in one of the world’s 28 megacities (with 10 million inhabitants or more). Many of the fastest-growing cities in the world are relatively small urban settlements. By 2030, the world is projected to have 41 mega-cities (DESA-UN 2014). It is clear that we need to understand the implications of high-density living, not only from a quantitative approach but also from an experiential, qualitative one (Cuff and Sherman, 2011). 2. METHODOLOGY: CONSTRUCTING UNDERSTANDINGS THROUGH MICRO-NARRATIVES This paper is qualitative in nature, and as such does not aim to confirm or reject hypotheses currently prevailing in research circles dealing with urban planning, city design and growth management. Instead, the paper’s aim is exploratory, following inductive rather than deductive logic using an interpretative approach. According to Swaffield and Deming (2011), interpretative research strategies “presumes that the meaning of objects, events, images and actions are not obvious,” hence requiring the researcher to make sense of them. The act of constructing such understandings positions the research in between the researcher(s) and the data (ibid). The methodology used here builds upon methods of autoethnography (cf. Denzin and Ellis) emphasising the researchers’ personal experience in relation to the research subject. This paper aims to 754 G. Aranda-Mena, PJ. Dahl and C. Dahl incorporate personal observations from first-hand experiences of Hong Kong’s dense urban fabric together with empirical data collected through literature studies. Using an autoethnographic approach, the paper’s three co-authors investigate subjective individual spatial and environmental experiences; hence, lessons are not to be taken deterministically but rather as a preamble to future research directions. As the structure of the paper follows that of a journey, the research also lends itself to methodologies inspired by the transareal approach of Alexander von Humboldt, appropriated by Diedrich, Lee and Braae (2014) into the method of travelling transect. In contrast to their method, in which they traverse an actual territory in situ, the three co-authors of this paper have revisited field notes and memories of Hong Kong in order to externalised their tacit experimental knowledge by means of a reflective narrative, here referred to as a micro-narrative. The narrational style of the paper emphasises the autoethnographic methodology and the interpretational strategy of the research by conveying a series of related plots (Abbott, 1992). To Abbott, narration of a case such as Hong Kong is to be understood as a sequence of major turning points and the “situational consequences flowing from these” (Barab and Squire, 2004). Such “turning points” can also be found in the work of Diedrich, Lee and Braae, who talk about prompts, “places of situated knowledge, which captured and sometimes deviated the researchers’ attention on site from the planned itinerary”. In this paper, the co-authors recognise ”prompts” and ”turning points” in their own writing as the key findings to be collaboratively cross-analysed and synthesised into conclusions. The cross-analysis identifies shared experiences, incorporating individual views by consensus amongst all three authors. There are no traditional validations of the conclusion apart from the overlaps of shared first-hand experiences of Hong Kong. The co-authors met twice in Hong Kong and held a number of follow-up meetings in Europe, where they discussed on their individual experiences of Hong Kong. The premise of this approach is that by eliciting personal experiences of the quality of life in the highest-density environment, one can translate those phenomena into principles to inform designing practices and the planning of future cities? The claim is that spatial micro-narratives and autoethnography can complement more quantitively driven research by incorporating lived experiences. With a personal constructivist exploratory approach, the ideation and envisioning mental process is in focus instead of binary ‘cause and effect’ inquiries. Our constructivist approach suggests the re-thinking of research questions as a step prior to quantitative investigations - which could happen at a later stage. At this point, we believe that reflections from three personal and professionally informed experiences are of importance. Extracting those experiences, lessons and observations explicitly from a tacit domain is thus the aim of the personal micro-narratives that constitutes the next section of this paper. The micro-narratives are written in first person in order to emphasise the first-hand experiences and to offer a close proximity for the reader to the narrators. 3. CASE: HONG KONG AS A MICRO-NARRATIVE In the following section, three individual voices share their personal micro-narratives. The structure is set as a journey, starting with reflections on interior spaces by the first author, moving into the movement between interior and exterior through three-dimensional urban porosity as narrated by the second author, and ending with a journey through the urban landscape by the third author. The combined narrative may show some points of overlap at which the authors define shared experience. This has been seen as positive, as those overlapping points become stronger in the cross-analysis exercise, creating clusters and allowing the authors to draw observations and conclusions. Figure 1: Sketch of development above rail tracks, Mong Kok. Macro-micro space outlook from work-living space and photo collage of porous urban space in Mong Kok, threshold and airshaft. Sketch and Photo collage by co-authors Guillermo Aranda-Mena (left) and Per-Joan Dahl (right). Learning from dense cities: Hong Kong spatial constructs as narratives 755 3.1 Narrative 1: Interior spaces The first micro-story concerns life, work and play in a vertical city, in particular to the experience of interior spaces. Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district seems to thrive on the spatial logics of the now-demolished Walled City, which comprised an inward vertical neighbourhood – perhaps the densest in the world, reaching over 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometre in 1997. In the 1990s, the city went through a major reconstruction,