A Caution on Hong Kong Envy

Despite the impulse to marvel at Hong Kong’s sophisticated planning for and investment in infrastructure and urban density, might people there welcome some New York-style urbanism? Norman Oder, author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recaps two conferences that suggest that New York’s mechanisms for community input on development projects, imperfect as they are, may themselves be worthy of a little envy from concerned citizens facing top-down urban planning regimes.C.S. 

UPDATE, 8.21.2010: please see the comments for an important clarification from the author.

 

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Thomas Birke.

In his “A Country of Cities” series on Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti recently described how he “attended a terrific conference on vertical density in Hong Kong.” The city-state, he suggested, has mastered the infrastructure challenge. He wrote:

I hadn’t visited in over a decade, and in that time more density has been built, a few more skyscrapers dot the stunning skyline, but the advances one really notices are on the ground. The new airport. The 20-minute train from the airport to downtown. The gleaming subways that glide under Victoria Harbor from Kowloon to Central. The stunning new bridges and tunnels. The lush country parks.

His argument presents examples that might rightly inspire New Yorkers and Americans to clamor for longer-range investment in infrastructure. Why doesn’t New York have a one-seat ride from its airports? Why shouldn’t high-speed rail connect Boston, New York, and Washington, DC?

Still, a notable irony was evident at two conferences organized by The Skyscraper Museum, Vertical Density/Sustainable Solutions, held in New York in October 2008, and Vertical Density: the Public Dimension, held this past January in Hong Kong. While Chakrabarti and other New Yorkers enthused about Hong Kong’s advances, many from Hong Kong worried about the cost of progress. As one top Hong Kong official observed in January, “People are complaining… enough is enough.”

At both conferences, those from Hong Kong invoked our city’s appreciation of history (or, to them, heritage), diversity of building types, avoidance of superblocks, rich street life, and relatively robust opportunity for citizen input. As became clear, density in Hong Kong was fostered by cultural, economic, and historical factors not present in recent-day New York, including top-down planning, warp-speed growth (driven by an influx of refugees from Communist China), an empowered mass transit agency, and a disengaged citizenry.

So while there’s a good argument to build residential density in New York — our city’s towers are primarily commercial — as well as infrastructure, the lessons from Hong Kong may be more aspirational than direct. (Metropolis columnist Karrie Jacobs, who covered the first conference, also teased out the contradictions in a December 2008 column headlined Boomtown Blues.)

 

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

The Hong Kong scene
Hilly and mountainous, more than three-quarters of Hong Kong territory is preserved as natural landscape, so the city-state has been forced to grow vertically. Complementing the dense central areas on Hong Kong Island, transit-based development creates cross-harbor New Towns out of dozens of identical apartment towers, typically 50-plus stories surrounding a shopping mall. Eminent domain is freely used, and the tax structure militates against warehousing land.

Given the constraints, there was no postwar suburbia to build, as in New York; there was no opportunity, as in New York, to have downzonings privilege wealthier transit-accessible low-rise neighborhoods while upzonings transformed their working-class counterparts, as New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently found (PDF).

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user -marten-

Hong Kong’s thicket of towers has produced a system of upper-level walkways with their own retail and corridor life. Not that it’s fully beloved. While Hong Kong may be the freest economy in the world, “when it comes to pedestrian movement, [it] is one of the least free places in the world,” observed urban designer Oren Tatcher in January.

Hong Kong’s growth has been driven significantly by its transit system, the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), founded in 1975. The MTR (once a public company, now private) acts as a master developer to insure integration of property with the railway, explained Thomas Ho, MTR Property Director, to rapt listeners at the New York conference.

Carrie Lam, since July 2007 Secretary for Development of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, explained that leveling mountains and reclaiming the harbor created the old airport’s runway, the entire new airport, and parts of the Central Business District.  “The harbor is unlikely to argue with you whether it is right or not to reclaim from the harbor,” she said at the New York conference.

That statement pricked up New York ears. Here, “building something in the water today in New York is virtually impossible for a variety of political and environmental reasons,” observed Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

American admiration
American respondents in New York expressed admiration for Hong Kong’s embrace of high-rises and the MTR’s ability to plan rationally. “There’s a dystopia associated with skyscrapers that we need to address,” suggested Ward, citing movies like Blade Runner.

Chakrabarti, then executive VP of the Related Companies, observed, “I think what we’ve seen today should make us, as New Yorkers, very humble, and should really give us pause.” While Americans reject “the culture of density,” he suggested that the real dystopia is evoked by movies like The Stepford Wives, which convey a “very isolated, scary, and fuel-inefficient suburban model.”

A veteran of the effort to build a Moynihan Station that would combine a new train station with mixed-use development, Chakrabarti said we should be “less scared” of public-private partnerships and should “capture land use value around train stations.”

The intangibles
That’s what they’ve done in Hong Kong, to an extent perhaps unique around the world. High-rise living, Ho suggested, can be achieved “in a very civilized way; it all depends on how you plan.”

But most units are smaller than 750 square feet. “We’re living in shoeboxes at extremely high density,” lamented architect Keith Griffiths at the follow-up conference. Local developer Keith Kerr added: “I’m all for building density around railway points, but we end up with a city that’s planned by a railway line.”

 

Kowloon Housing. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

People in Hong Kong, suggested real estate consultant Nicholas Brooke, pragmatically accept vertical living, though some New Towns residents have experienced “family feuds, suicides, things that build up from pressure from living in high-rise towers.” While planning “was very much driven by engineers” and an effort to maximize land revenues, now there’s a growing sense that intangibles should be considered, Brooke said.

Hong Kong’s functionalism, added Peter Cookson Smith, an architect, city planner and urban designer, is “producing an undifferentiated city form of standard blocks” in contrast to the diversity in New York that “simply takes your breath away.”

Christine Loh, CEO of the think tank Civic Exchange, showed pictures of Hong Kong people going through their daily activities. “How do we preserve the feel of these places?” She and others expressed admiration how issues like landmarking have been translated into New York’s policy. She also cited universities and think tanks as examples of a “tremendous civil society and engagement.”

Hong Kong matures
Secretary for Development Lam, in New York, suggested that, as Hong Kong’s growth has slowed, planners have more of a “luxury” to address issues like building height and bulk and the lack of street life. She described an intensive public planning process for the old airport site at Kai Tak in which more parks emerged, thanks to “an extensive reduction in density.”

Later, at the Hong Kong conference, Lam was more emphatic, asserting that, as much as possible, “We should balance redevelopment with building rehabilitation, revitalization, and preservation of some of our historic past.”

 

Battery Park City. Photo by Flickr user MD111.

Solutions in New York
Of course Hong Kong and New York have been traveling along different paths. Chakrabarti, in Hong Kong, suggested it was dangerous to compare the two cities’ responses to density, given that New York is “a city that may be very dense at its center, but is extraordinarily sprawling as a region.” And he pointed out that a “mature” city like London also surpasses New York in building infrastructure.

“It’s very difficult to build and finance infrastructure if you don’t believe in central authority,” Chakrabarti said, a hint at the regional inequities he’s highlighted.

It’s hard to disagree, as the main challenge remains regional and national. Still, New York’s record suggests that, even within the city, the rational planning process can be distorted. Consider how the Furman Center suggested fairness has been scanted in the city’s rezonings.

Or consider how the Port Authority’s Ward, at the New York conference, suggested that the resistance to the massive Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn stemmed from locals’ discomfort with a dramatic shift in density. While that shift surely generated dismay, an equal measure of discomfort derives from the perception that Atlantic Yards has been a sweetheart deal, with a single developer anointed public land before any planning process, and with public amenities such as open space coming late rather than early.

Chakrabarti observed that communities will accept density only if the infrastructure is there first; indeed, a showcase New York example at the Hong Kong conference was Battery Park City, with its parkland frontloaded and parcels bid out to multiple developers, though it was acknowledged that original goals for affordable housing were not met.

A former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning turned developer turned academic, Chakrabarti knows New York’s constraints: “We cannot generate amenities, open space, even simple improvements to the subway system without harnessing new development.” If so, as in Hong Kong, it’s important to get the balance right between the development business and the central authorities entrusted with the public interest.

 

New York City. Photo by Flickr user Christopher Isherwood. 

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Brooklyn journalist Norman Oder, who’s written the Atlantic Yards Report watchdog blog for more than four years, attended the first conference and watched the second conference panels via webcast.

The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.

Comments

New Yorker August 12, 2010

Why doesn’t New York have a one seat ride to the airports? The evil Rudy G. (not really evil, just his media image) asked the same questions and fought to have a one seat ride.
The Kew Gardens neighborhood association fought against the Air Train, (too high) and won.
Rudy then refused to allow renew the airports leases with the Port Authority. 9/11 came, Rudy left office, Bloomy, in an effort to be the anti Rudy, a kinder gentler Mayor, sign the leases with the evil NYNJPA and watch the PA ignore the airports, bridges, tunnels to battle over the Freedom Tower.

this is a brief reason why the Air Train does not end at East 59th Street in Manhattan.

John Massengale August 12, 2010

A few things New York emphatically does not need: more glass towers; looking more like Houston, Shanghai and Dubai; or this architectonic penis envy. Paul Goldberger correctly pointed out a few years ago that it is a sign of an immature culture to constantly aspire to bigger and bigger towers.

For a multitude of reasons, we are in a period of transition. This includes more modest ways of living and new economic models that are not based on mandatory growth, and that don’t foster the climate change that model has produced.

Here in America, we have about 5% of the population, but we use about 27% of the world’s energy. We are an oil dependent country in a world in which oil is running out, and most of the oil that is left is in the hands of countries that don’t like us very much.

Here in New York, we are the greenest place in America, but we are a long, long way from being one of the greenest places in the world. One reason for that is our churn and burn model of development, in which we tear down perfectly good buildings embodying a lot of energy and replace them with pseudo-green glass towers. Because of the USGBC’s cumulative LEED rating system (that gives points for things like bicycle racks), some of those can get platinum ratings, but the reality is that their expensive glass skins have very poor insulation values and complicated and expensive glass made to deal with solar gain (still poorly) that will have to be replaced in two or three decades. The construction and lifetime maintenance of them takes ridiculous amounts of energy.

The old towers necessarily had smaller floorplates, with natural lighting and ventilation. They were also, to almost everyone but architects and developers, more beautiful than the towers we build now. People love the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and Wall Street. No one loves 6th Avenue or the blocks in midtown that have no more old buildings.

We need a walkable, sustainable city that becomes more and more efficient every year. Part of that means making places where people want to walk. And that means making streets that are safe and comfortable for pedestrians. Survey the residents of New York and you will find that their favorite blocks – the places where they want to walk – are primarily blocks with no glass buildings. When there are glass buildings, they are rare enough that they add variety and visual interest to the streetscape. One example is the Cooper Square Hotel. But surveys have shown that people don’t like walking past Thom Mayne’s Cooper building, a dark and brooding presence on the street.

Giles August 20, 2010

“there was no opportunity, as in New York, to have downzonings privilege wealthier transit-accessible low-rise neighborhoods while upzonings transformed their working-class counterparts, as New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently found (PDF).”

The study says that a majority of BOTH downzonings and upzonings happened in lower-income areas that were within half a mile of a rail link (=transit rich). Downzonings occurred more in lower-income white neighborhoods and upzonings occurred more in lower-income Hispanic/African American neighborhoods. Contextual rezonings, by contrast, occurred more often in wealthier neighborhoods.

Norman Oder August 21, 2010

Thanks to Giles for the clarification; I apologize for the error.

Indeed, according to the Furman Center press release, “upzoned lots tended to be located in neighborhoods with a higher proportion of black and Hispanic residents than the median neighborhood in the City. On the other hand, downzoned and contextually-only rezoned lots were more likely to be located in tracts with a higher share of white residents, and smaller shares of black and Hispanic residents than the City median. In addition, the report finds that contextual-only rezoned lots tended to be in areas with much higher median income than that of the City as a whole, while upzoned and downzoned lots were in areas with median incomes lower than the City.”

While that vitiates my point somewhat (but not completely) about class differences, I believe it still backs the argument that fairness in the rezoning process is significantly impacted by political clout.

Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D. December 6, 2010

Nice job, Norman. Two questions. First, am I misreading this piece, or are the speakers at these conferences equating residential density with highrise apartment towers? Second, if they are, why so? Paris has tightly-built blocks of six- and eight-story buildings, and its residential density is greater than that of Mumbai.