Hong Kong News

Nonpartisan, Noncommercial, unconstrained.
Friday, Mar 29, 2024

How high-rise living has helped Hong Kong communities thrive

How high-rise living has helped Hong Kong communities thrive

Building vertically was, in reality, Hong Kong’s only option due to the geology and climate, but the city has made the best of it. Creating communities around MTR stations has strengthened rather than weakened community engagement and helped bind us together.

A fuss over the latest super-tall tower to pierce the sky above New York’s Central Park has got me thinking about the neighbourhood-destroying potential of high-rise buildings and how Hong Kong’s community-wide adoption of vertical living is distinct and perhaps not as harmful.

This most recent kerfuffle is over Steinway Tower on 111 West 57th Street, the newest glass sliver to rise 435 metres above Billionaire’s Row along the southern end of Central Park. It has surpassed Hong Kong’s 75-storey Highcliff on Stubbs Road to claim the title of the world’s skinniest building. Steinway Tower is indeed a monument to brilliant modern engineering, but it is also a dubious addition to the neighbourhood it now looms over.

Edwin Heathcote, long-standing architecture and design critic for the Financial Times, last week called Steinway Tower “a deposit of unimaginable wealth in the sky” that is divorced from the life of the city below. “Its ethereal profile makes it the purest illustration of architecture as an expression of surplus capital,” he said – not a home but a luxury good, “more like a land-bound yacht”.

The tower is the latest of a series of seven supertall residential buildings – including One57, Central Park Tower, Central Park South and 432 Park Avenue – that now cast their long shadows over the park. Critics have dubbed them “safe-deposit boxes in the sky”.

These flats are not built for New Yorkers. They are built exclusively for the often-absent super-rich, selling for up to US$66 million and bought through offshore entities intended to disguise ownership. They are designed for the well-heeled to avoid “the possibility of accidental encounter with a neighbour or an ordinary citizen”.

Despite its height and cost, Steinway Tower has just 60 condominiums. As Samuel Stein at the City University of New York recently noted: “The problem with super-thin high-rises is not their size per se. It’s that so few people live in them … Instead of 60 gigantic condos, this building could fit 442 normal-sized apartments.”

Instead of drawing in the local community, Heathcote says, they are “floating over but alienated from the city”. At street level, the cafes, restaurants, stores, actors’ studios, small offices and newspaper stands that once populated 57th Street have gone. “The only people around are doormen.”

Critics contrast these supertall residential towers with, for example, the Rockefeller Center, completed in 1939 and still a focal point of constant public and civic activity. Heathcote recalls the “golden era” of skyscrapers in the 1920s and 1930s, which aspired to build vertical cities “connecting the street to the sky via a labyrinth of corridors and arcades, shops, hotels, restaurants, subways, studios, theatres and, of course, offices”.

My sense here in Hong Kong is that life in a high-rise city can still aspire to that golden-era vision. Vertical cities were not intended to be in the image of today’s Billionaire’s Row.

Hong Kong has for decades been more densely populated with supertall buildings than any other city. Estimates suggest it has around 9,000 high-rise buildings, putting it well beyond the likes of Shenzhen, Shanghai, New York and Dubai.

Legend has it that more than half of Hong Kong’s population lives above the 15th floor. While I have never been able to confirm this, my intuition says it’s about right. Other reports estimate that the combined height of all Hong Kong’s high-rises is over 333km.

There are specific reasons Hong Kong came to dominate vertical living. Our steep mountains and narrow coastal wedges of flat land forced builders to look up rather than build horizontally.

Our sharp mountain backdrops made skyscrapers feel at home and in scale, unlike in London, New York or Dubai. Their comparatively flat landscapes enabled horizontal spread and made skyscrapers feel out of proportion.

The hectic development during the past three decades of our MTR network created a unique business model in which new town communities were built vertically from every station. Our heat and heavy rain encouraged planners to concentrate community amenities in, or close to, each station. The tiny flats built for our population encouraged Hongkongers to eat and socialise outside.

As a result, our vertical lives have strengthened rather than weakened community engagement. Even in the heart of Central, a mix of office and hotel towers rises out of vast and bustling shopping complexes.

In my early years in Hong Kong, I always marvelled how the walk from my flat to the Star Ferry took me through three hotel lobbies, two office towers and along one of the world’s largest shopping centres. Our high-rise developments encouraged community footfall rather than keeping out local people.

Workers clean the windows of a high-rise building in Central on February 4, 2021.


It used to be said that the skyline belonged to God, broken only by spires and cathedral domes. As we moved into more secular times, the brick chimneys of Industrial Revolution manufacturing and then grand commercial headquarters began to dominate our skylines, accompanied by our monuments to civic identity.

In the second half of the 20th century, the high-rise buildings that began to crowd our skylines were public housing estates for low-income families.

Only recently have the super-rich begun the de facto privatisation of the skyline by substituting exclusive condominiums in the sky for the mansions and gardens at ground level that were traditionally hidden behind high walls. Hong Kong is among them, with its fair share of egregious wealth and “safe-deposit boxes in the sky”, but they are not so ostentatiously set apart.

High-rise living is a democratic virtue we have made out of a necessity forced on us by geology and climate. It is a common plight that has bound us together rather than set us apart. Long may it stay that way.

Newsletter

Related Articles

Hong Kong News
0:00
0:00
Close
It's always the people with the dirty hands pointing their fingers
Paper straws found to contain long-lasting and potentially toxic chemicals - study
FTX's Bankman-Fried headed for jail after judge revokes bail
Blackrock gets half a trillion dollar deal to rebuild Ukraine
Steve Jobs' Son Launches Venture Capital Firm With $200 Million For Cancer Treatments
Google reshuffles Assistant unit, lays off some staffers, to 'supercharge' products with A.I.
End of Viagra? FDA approved a gel against erectile dysfunction
UK sanctions Russians judges over dual British national Kara-Murza's trial
US restricts visa-free travel for Hungarian passport holders because of security concerns
America's First New Nuclear Reactor in Nearly Seven Years Begins Operations
Southeast Asia moves closer to economic unity with new regional payments system
Political leader from South Africa, Julius Malema, led violent racist chants at a massive rally on Saturday
Today Hunter Biden’s best friend and business associate, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden met in Georgetown with Russian Moscow Mayor's Wife Yelena Baturina who later paid Hunter Biden $3.5 million in so called “consulting fees”
'I am not your servant': IndiGo crew member, passenger get into row over airline meal
Singapore Carries Out First Execution of a Woman in Two Decades Amid Capital Punishment Debate
Spanish Citizenship Granted to Iranian chess player who removed hijab
US Senate Republican Mitch McConnell freezes up, leaves press conference
Speaker McCarthy says the United States House of Representatives is getting ready to impeach Joe Biden.
San Francisco car crash
This camera man is a genius
3D ad in front of Burj Khalifa
Next level gaming
BMW driver…
Google testing journalism AI. We are doing it already 2 years, and without Google biased propoganda and manipulated censorship
Unlike illegal imigrants coming by boats - US Citizens Will Need Visa To Travel To Europe in 2024
Musk announces Twitter name and logo change to X.com
The politician and the journalist lost control and started fighting on live broadcast.
The future of sports
Unveiling the Black Hole: The Mysterious Fate of EU's Aid to Ukraine
Farewell to a Music Titan: Tony Bennett, Renowned Jazz and Pop Vocalist, Passes Away at 96
Alarming Behavior Among Florida's Sharks Raises Concerns Over Possible Cocaine Exposure
Transgender Exclusion in Miss Italy Stirs Controversy Amidst Changing Global Beauty Pageant Landscape
Joe Biden admitted, in his own words, that he delivered what he promised in exchange for the $10 million bribe he received from the Ukraine Oil Company.
TikTok Takes On Spotify And Apple, Launches Own Music Service
Global Trend: Using Anti-Fake News Laws as Censorship Tools - A Deep Dive into Tunisia's Scenario
Arresting Putin During South African Visit Would Equate to War Declaration, Asserts President Ramaphosa
Hacktivist Collective Anonymous Launches 'Project Disclosure' to Unearth Information on UFOs and ETIs
Typo sends millions of US military emails to Russian ally Mali
Server Arrested For Theft After Refusing To Pay A Table's $100 Restaurant Bill When They Dined & Dashed
The Changing Face of Europe: How Mass Migration is Reshaping the Political Landscape
China Urges EU to Clarify Strategic Partnership Amid Trade Tensions
The Last Pour: Anchor Brewing, America's Pioneer Craft Brewer, Closes After 127 Years
Democracy not: EU's Digital Commissioner Considers Shutting Down Social Media Platforms Amid Social Unrest
Sarah Silverman and Renowned Authors Lodge Copyright Infringement Case Against OpenAI and Meta
Why Do Tech Executives Support Kennedy Jr.?
The New York Times Announces Closure of its Sports Section in Favor of The Athletic
BBC Anchor Huw Edwards Hospitalized Amid Child Sex Abuse Allegations, Family Confirms
Florida Attorney General requests Meta CEO's testimony on company's platforms' alleged facilitation of illicit activities
The Distorted Mirror of actual approval ratings: Examining the True Threat to Democracy Beyond the Persona of Putin
40,000 child slaves in Congo are forced to work in cobalt mines so we can drive electric cars.
×