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Now that we are here, where are we?
Somewhere that bridges today and tomorrow.
A ripple in time.
Now that we are here, where are we?
Somewhere that bridges today and tomorrow.
A ripple in time.
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Our world is still at a precipice.
The accelerating exploitation of the ecosystems by human activities have led us into the existential planetary crisis. How we respond now may make a difffference, but is it enough to re-route the fate of the planet and all life forms?17 It is time for the return to our attachment to the land and our attention to the earth.18
An utopian state as an expression of the Metabolist thinking is not megastructure. The vision of this future is less of a system and more of a plan that surrenders to change and the unknown. Self-sustaining not through the means of control, but through the interdependence among disparate elements. A work-in-progress mentality. A shaking of its order as an attempt to end the systemic crisis, whose casual relationships and ramififications we are beginning to understand.
A mediation between an urbanism of the large infrastructure (controlled public system) and the consideration (freedom) of the individual. A radical rethinking of our attachments to the new and the eco-technical solutions that are suitable for a just social and cultural practices.
We are data-dreaming, dreaming of:
a change of governance;
a change of collective consciounesse;
a change to a mass-oriented society;
a cross-sectoral planning;
a stronger attachment to our economic system,
of our concept of equity;
a future as a driver for greater systemic change.
But the megastructures were a vision of the future,
not of the future itself.
The 21st century marked its revival as an adaptation strategy to mitigate our failing world. Reinterpreted and greener versions of Agricultural City as megastructure were steadily being realized as ways to combat overpopulation, desertification, over exhaustion of our natural resources, and the need for clean energy.
Greener,
more sustainable,
more accessible,
fairer,
freer,
happier, like a utopian state?
The notion of megastructure as vertical urbanism of the 21st century attempted to leverage the power of technology and new environmental consciousness to promote eco-districts in a city scale. Yet, the rapid development, concrete channels, walled-barriers of the megastructures, further exhausted our already compromised biodiversity. The technological salvation of net zero or net-positive
energy buildings did not slow down our soaring carbon emissions. The flood walls and the green city towers that sat on concrete stilts above our rising sea levels failed as long-term flood mitigation strategies. The expansion of megastructure replaced our old-growth forests and wetlands. Our aquatic fauna ecosystem failed to flourish.
This was the ecological paradigm of our time as we forge our ways towards a viable future in a failing world. The philosophy of America, grounded in the notion of perpetual technological progress and humankind’s infinite capacity to accumulate knowledge, has undermined the wisdom required to maintain harmony between
human and universe.1 The First Industrial Revolution of the Great Britain in the 18th century introduced hydraulic and steam machine to factories. The Second Industrial Revolution opened the market to affordable consumer products by ways of mass production and the assembly of products made possible by labour division.2 This created a critical cultural paradigm shift: the pursuit of globalization and our new affinity for the attainment of power, control, and comfort at all costs.
Today, we still stand on the cusp of the Forth Industrial Revolution – the Industry 4.0. Introduced at the 2011 Hanover Fair, the Industry 4.0 built upon previous industrial revolutions, including the Third Industrial Revolution which gifted us the electronic, information technology, and manufacturing automation.3 The industry 4.0 has been successful in blurring the boundaries of the physical, digital, and biological technology as a fusion of advances in Artificial Intelligence
(AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). AI and machine learning is maturing at unprecedented rate; simulating human thinking and human behavioural process to generate hidden insights without being programmed beforehand. The Internet of Things (IoT) has digitally connected the world through identification, monitoring, and tracking technologies. The promise to raise global income levels and social equality as a trade-off has proven to be empty to those
without access to the digital world.
As one of the main technological drivers of the Forth Industrial Revolution, AI has been building our cities. We taught AI how to study our existing data to make informed decisions on our urban planning and architectural designs. The technology of AI and generative design, through the language of complex algorithms, allow us to revive the Metabolist architectural thinking to validate the belief that limits set by earth’s topography permit us to build on artificial land;4
megastructural architecture and large infrastructure of expansive highways and road network superimposed on the natural ground, suspended on platforms, sharing little relationship with the earth’s original topography.
Combating the problem of 800k+ privately owned vehicles;
a move towards a car-free city.
Hong Kong (HKSAR)
While the megastructural projects of the 21st century were unsuccessful in combating climate change, the master plan that supported the system of megastructure provided the framework needed for a transit-oriented, car-free, and walkable city. As one of the densest urban areas in the high-income world – with a
density estimated at 67,000 per square mile5 – the city of Hong Kong
is a transit-dependent metropolitan which produced some of the
highest levels of traffic congestion for the past decades. The Climate
Ready Hong Kong initiative of 2030 was successfully in implementing
pedestrian and low-speed driving zones, despite significant resistance
from the 800k+ car owners in the city.6
The final elimination of 800k+ private owned cars rendered the city of Hong Kong a surplus of highways, ramps, cross-bridges, and roads empty and inactive. The clusters of highrises in addition to the expansion of megastructure development
freed up corridors and small nodes that were previously occupied by vehicles. A reality of daily life carried out by walking, leaving behind our tethered car-dependent urban planning legacy. The large infrastructure that was once built for motorized vehicles have become a ghost landscape.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), along with our advancing data science technologies overcame the engineering hurdles of the early 21st century and retrofitted the underground Mass Transit Railway (MTR) system and the Airport Express extension, converting heavy and light rail to a Hyperloop – a solarpowered
floating pod system that travels through low-pressure tubes, a technology that is akin to an air hockey table.7
The hyper-fast travel of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) significantly reduced travel time between Hong Kong and nearby cities of China; a stern reminder of the 2108 version of a high-speed rail which granted cities of
China full access to the city.8 The border police stations and custom officials placed within the designated areas rendered the city of Hong Kong vulnerable to a highly controlled system equipped with facial recognition and tracking technologies. The undermining of public trust began.
The green corridor,
and the rejection of public space.
The ghost landscape of the elevated highways, cross-bridges, and ramps that traverse the city are the new artificial ground. A new surface for pedestrian green corridors that are connected to the adjacent buildings. They are to become a new form of public space.
A distinction from the three types of open spaces established by the Hong Kong (HKSAR) government – Green Open Space for the conservation of natural environment; Active Open Space for recreational activity; and Passive Open Space for parks and gardens.9 The new pedestrian green corridor is classified as Artificial Open Space, defined as any landscaped area built on the former vehicular infrastructure. Strict guidelines dictates passive recreational activities as the main legal use of space and a zero-tolerance policy towards small to large gathering and occupation of any Artificial Open Space, as is the case for the other three categories of open spaces.
The question of public space or public use, and to whom do the spaces that are publicly accessible serve remains.10 The history of the public realm has evolved around struggles over access, while the politics of public space of this century highlights the flawed perception that public space is inherently democratic. Agency is now a rare commodity. It is unclear to whom agency is granted in this new precinct of publicly accessible Artificial Open Space.11
The years between 2015 and 2025 marked a decade of symbolic stand against high-tech controls and tech-backed authoritarianism. It was a decade of transforming and rearranging Hong Kong’s urban landscape as ways to reclaim the city from the tight grip of hightech control. The strength of public space as an embodiment of
impassioned activism was tested against a high ratio of CCTV cameras installed across the city, ultimately pushing the boundary that safeguards the private from the public realm as surveillance cameras were installed outside of every residential home by the end of 2100.
The evolution of the Industry 4.0 and its technological counterparts that make up a powerful public controlled system, reinforced by a digital “health code” system and contract-tracing smart-phone app established during the corona-virus crisis as
way to control and track all human movements, have significantly undermined public trust. The green corridors of the Artificial Open Space were not embraced by the citizens of Hong Kong. An all-workno- play and a remote working and learning culture rendered the new pedestrian friendly corridors primarily unused.
The vacant sites became a sanctuary and fertile grounds for spontaneous and diverse planting. The return of nature as an embodiment of different plant species finding nesting grounds as the pace of urban change continues, highlighting the global interconnections of plant species, manifested in the ostensibly unremarkable clusters of weeds and native grasses. An ecological formation that is defiant of control, an alternative interpretation of a set of social and political parameters.12
Flooding is no longer seasonal.
The sea has consumed the ground plain.
The city of Hong Kong is historically influenced by extreme sea levels associated with tropical cyclones known locally as seasonal typhoons.13 The hig temperatures of summer seasons are broken by typhoons and rainstorms, during which the city endures torrential downpours that render any drainage system insufficient.14 The vast amount of impermeable surfaces that make up our large infrastructure made flooding far worse. As such is the progress of heavy urbanization.
Since the 1950s, various options were exercised to build up Hong Kong’s coastal resilience. Strategies include the construction of high dykes to protect reclamations from being over-topped; the toppingup of low-lying areas prone to flooding during urban renewal; the zoning of land use according to tolerance of flood damage; and the installation flood pumping stations in development areas.15
The year 2020 marked an installation of the largest underground storage tank as preventive measure against storm surge flooding. Underneath the Happy Valley Racecourse landmark sits a storage tank at a size that is comparable to twenty-four standard size swimming pools. The vast chamber retained up to 60,000 square meters of water which by 2050, it was at full capacity outside of typhoon seasons. The priority to maintain prime real estate limited the options for natural and nature-based coastal resilience strategies such as vegetated buffer zones and designated areas for intentional flooding. Our storm surge barriers – most of which were build on landfill and manufactured land – failed to keep up with the rising sea levels.
By 2200, our “forward-looking” environmental public-policy along with the engineering salvation of flood-wall, surge barriers, tide gate, storage tank have lost the race against high tide and humandriven climate change. Flooding is no longer seasonal. Sea water has risen above and consumed the ground plain. All that is left are the elevated corridors as the connective tissue of Hong Kong’s urban condition. “Homeland” is no longer assured. A migratory crisis as we face the question of whether we look for a new place to land.16
“…occasionally the river floods these places.
Floods is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding;
it is remembering. remembering where it used to be. all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get
back to where it was.”
The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison
The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison
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