Cities Without Ground
By Adam Frampton, Jonathan Solomon, Clara Wong
Between its many contributing authors, one of the core messages I understood from the book was Hong Kong’s lack of a sense of land. Where American and European homeowners would understand that the value of their home was somehow related to the value of the land that it sits on, the three-dimentionalness of Hong Kong doesn’t give its residence a “grounded feeling”.
A typical day could go from a 30th floor apartment building, through a shopping mall into the subway 20 meters below ground, and arriving at the office on the 53rd storey. For many residents, a typical week could even go by without the need to walk on ground level or stepping on a sidewalk. Readers can read for themselves how Hong Kong is the future envisioned by H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang in the early 20th century, but is it really what we want?
This book goes into the use of retail space and public access to private property in a quasi public-private understanding that those pedestrians using private retail space to access public services are also the same people who consume in those retail spaces to keep them profitable. While the mall may be a weekend excursion for some cultures, the well-integrated mixed-use land policy in Hong Kong has made office, retail, and residential space nearly indistinguishable from one another.
