Stair Culture: Redefining Pedestrian Infrastructure
Strategies of engagement and intervention in complex urban communities
BALS2 Fall 2012 ▪ ARCH 2043 Landscape Design Studio II: Site and Community
Instructor: Melissa Cate Christ & Maxime Decaudin
From the course syllabus:
“There is a need to define a sense of place through buildings and other means, at the moment when such a sense of place (fragile to begin with) is being threatened with erasure by a more and more insistently globalizing space”.
(Abbas, 1997, p.69)
As part of the everyday landscape of mountainous Hong Kong, outdoor stairways play a critical role in creating a permeable and accessible public realm. Embedded in hillsides, stacked on sidewalks or replacing streets and alleys altogether, Hong Kong’s ubiquitous stairs are a reflection of the diverse character of the city itself, often exemplifying what Peter Rowe has called the “lane life” of the spaces in between buildings found in many East Asian cities (2005, p.121). Stairs act as an indicator of human contact, a marking of topography which becomes a cultural topographic map, evidence of a fundamental level of human-landscape intervention which is relatively sensitive to its surroundings. By enabling formalized pedestrian access to places previously inaccessible, stairs allow the occupation and transformation of slopes, making history in the places in which they are located.
Historic or not, Hong Kong stairs are not recognized or protected as a class in Hong Kong. Only three out of thousands have been given any sort of heritage status, although many, at least in the Central and Western District, are made from local granite and date back to the mid-19th century, making them some of the oldest remaining built insertions in the city. As a result, evidenced by careless maintenance practices and significant infrastructural projects and proposals, the character, quality, and very fabric of the steps and their associated public realm is deteriorating or being eliminated. In addition, neighborhoods currently benefitting from the peaceful environment and relative vehicular inaccessibility that their topography provides, are under threat, in a city whose built heritage has only just begun to be publicly discussed and valued after half a century or more of physical and environmental degradation, neglect, and active destruction and replacement in the name of urban renewal and financial gain (Lee and DiStephano, 2007).
Stair Culture
Stairs are all too often seen as barriers to be replaced by an elevator or an escalator, rather than being understood as pieces of cultural and physical heritage which have shaped the very essence of the city. By investigating the role of stairs in defining the character of the Blake Garden neighborhood within the context of Hong Kong, a Stair Culture is discovered whose existence can condition types of intervention which will respect and improve the existing fabric of the city, rather than perpetuate the current practices of devaluation, destruction, and replacement of that which is deemed no longer useful or profitable enough. These destruct-to-construct practices have led to the generally poor condition of the public realm and the increasingly placeless, generic Hong Kong we find today.
This studio project aims to redefine pedestrian infrastructure in Hong Kong as an agent in the creation of places of social and cultural value through strategies of situational redefinition where generic solutions are adapted to meet specific needs after a close examination and documentation of circumstances. As a typology of infrastructure, stairs are understood not just as circulation corridors but also as integral to the identity of the communities in which they reside – they both reflect and embody their environment.
Cultural connections to stairs are not immediately apparent, but have meaning to the people who use them and places where they exist. These connections, and the sense of discovery and relative privacy they elicit, are valuable parts of a future city where difference can be prioritized over equality, community benefit over financial gain, slowness over speed, and meandering-through over travelling above.
The studio consists of one project which is divided into five (5) parts: 1) photo diaries; 2) interpretive mapping & documentation; 3) case studies and precedents; 4) Area framework strategies; and 5) Site design interventions, which will be complemented by regular readings/ discussion on landscape topics and theory.
Selected projects and the course syllabus are online here.
