Borrowed Spaces by Christopher DeWolf

Author:Christopher DeWolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fictiom
ISBN: 9781760143978
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Build Your Own City

Walking through Hong Kong raises my blood pressure. I’m a dedicated pedestrian; given the choice, I prefer to walk. Considering that less than 10 per cent of Hong Kong’s population get around by car, you would think I’d be in good company, yet the streets here are anything but pedestrian-friendly. There are few trees and even fewer benches. Roadside fences pen you into narrow, overcrowded sidewalks, lest you dash into the street and get in the way of the Toyota Alphard minivans beloved by the chauffeured class. There are plenty of small parks, plazas and ‘sitting-out areas’ – a quaintly named variety of gated public space that usually consists of a few benches and some shrubs – but many of them are poorly designed. One sitting-out area on Queen’s Road East consists of two benches and a patch of concrete surrounded by a wall.

On paper, Hong Kong has a lot of public open spaces, but they aren’t quality spaces. You get the sense that most of the city’s public outdoor areas exist to tick boxes on somebody’s checklist; they aren’t designed for people to actually gather and chat, or lie down for a quick lunchtime nap. If you aren’t sitting rigidly on a bench, staring straight ahead, these spaces aren’t for you.

Serbian architect Selena Savic calls this kind of thing ‘unpleasant design’. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, she said it ‘refers to things that are intentionally and successfully rendered unusable, or uncomfortable for people to use. It’s not about objects that are badly designed, but the opposite – objects, devices and spaces that are well designed in order to prohibit a particular use or behaviour’.20 In other words, it’s a form of social control. Design a bad bench so homeless people don’t linger; fence off your sitting-out area so people don’t spend too much time there.

In more suburban places, this hostile architecture has contributed to a decline of the commons, as more and more people spend their time in private spaces. But Hong Kongers don’t have that kind of luxury; they need an outlet from their tiny apartments. So they make their own space.

In a quiet alleyway behind Hollywood Road, a group of old men gather around folding tables to play cards and Chinese chess. Listening to the radio – Cantonese opera on weekdays, horse races on Sunday – they sit on threadbare office recliners, second-hand stools, worn wooden dining chairs. At night, the wail of opera gives way to boozy laughter as this makeshift living room is taken over by patrons from Club 71, an adjacent bar named for the annual pro-democracy march. It’s time-shared urban space.

This isn’t anything deliberate; the people who use these borrowed spaces don’t pay them much thought. It’s just a pragmatic response to an uncomfortable urban environment. In Hong Kong, the line between public and private space has always been blurry. Shops spill onto the streets like overflowing Aladdin’s caves. Someone places an altar beneath a tree and it grows into a neighbourhood shrine.

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