Sidewalk Stories
Melissa Cate Christ and Tom Oliver Payne
Kerb 32: Unsaid
Melissa and Tom are excited to announce the publication of their photo essay ‘Sidewalk Stories’ in Kerb 32: Unsaid. The text is complemented by Tom’s photographs of the Inner West neighborhood of Dulwich Hill. The aim of the piece was to document everyday moments which are often overlooked or unnoticed, but which provide a window to understanding the human and non human occupation of the places in which we live.
More info about the issue, the other articles, and a link to purchase the magazine from Uro Publications can be found here.
Documenting topographic ecologies in Hong Kong
Recombinant Ecologies in the City
Ed. by Ilaria Vanni and Alexandra Crosby, Visual Communication 2020-8 19(3), p. 391-414.
Andrew Toland and Melissa Cate Christ
We are pleased to announce that Documenting topographic ecologies in Hong Kong: visual methods for hyper-dense and hyper-topographic urban spaces in landscape architecture, an article written by Andrew Toland and Melissa Cate Christ, has been published. The article appears in Recombinant Ecologies in the City, a Special Issue of the journal Visual Communication (Volume 19 Issue 3, August 2020). The issue was edited by Ilaria Vanni and Alexandra Crosby. Please find the abstract below and the article (unfortunately closed access – get in touch if you would like access) here.
Still shot from Pottinger Street 360 film by Nicholas Buechi. © Nicolas Buechi.
This article draws on experiments with techniques of visual documentation and representation in circumstances of topographic intensity in Hong Kong. Centrally, the authors ask: how can approaches to visual representation reveal or reframe assemblages of material and immaterial processes in hyper-dense and hyper-topographic urban landscapes? The shaping and reshaping of the ground are essential parts of the formation of recombinant ecosystems, especially in intensively built-up environments – the constant reconfiguration of materials and spaces continually brings into being new ecological conditions. However, the visualization and representation of these transformations are often absent from the repertoire of techniques used to map and understand urban processes. This article addresses how landscape architecture can continue to develop methods to record, represent, visualize and design recombinant ecosystems in our urban environments. It considers which tools and techniques might provide ‘thickened’ understandings of hyper-dense, small-scale and intensely topographic urban environments like Hong Kong, with the objective of assisting designers and planners develop new ways to understand and see public space that can address the human and more-than-human nuances of complex urban spaces over time.
editorial
A path to increasing food security in Hong Kong?
Food sovereignty, food waste reduction, and local food production
Ming Pao Weekly (in Traditional Chinese)
November 21, 2016
Melissa has published a short editorial in the Hong Kong magazine Ming Pao Weekly advocating for the need to address food insecurity in Hong Kong. The full text is below or you can read it online (in English) here. 
Choi Yuen Farm Photo credit: Melissa Cate Christ
Ranked high on Nomura’s 2010 Food Vulnerability Index (7th of 80 countries), and with 4.4% of GDP spent on food imports (the highest in the world), Hong Kong’s food security is an area of concern and focus by government bodies, academics, NGOs, and local businesses and entrepreneurs. Food security is defined as the right of “all people, at all times, [to] have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). The availability of food, either through local supply or imports, along with physical and economic access to food and the ability to utilize food both safely and nutritionally, are the three primary dimensions of ensuring food security.
In Hong Kong, we rely on imports for over 90% of the food which our 7.2m people eat each year, putting the city at a high risk of food unavailability given conditions such as disaster events, climate change, population increase or political and social unrest that can restrict exports to reserve food for local populations, or disrupt supplies from international trading partners. Top importers include China, USA, Brazil and Japan, followed closely by Australia and France. These imports are distributed to over 14,000 food retail outlets, including over 9,000 wet market stalls.
Although two supermarket chains (Welcome and ParknShop, with over 250 outlets each) account for 75% of all supermarket turnover, wet markets continue to play an important role in distribution and sales, but are losing sales to supermarkets, which are up to 54% of total retail sales in 2010 from 44% in 1995. However, considering that Mainland China provides 94% of the fresh pork, 100% of the fresh beef, 92% of vegetables and 66% of eggs consumed in HK, is food at a wet market actually any different than that bought at a supermarket? What choice do consumers really have? Is this reliance on imports and a supermarket duopoly sustainable? How much of that food is wasted along the food chain? How do these situations impact vulnerable populations, such as the 18% of residents who live below the poverty line? Can a focus on local production, food waste reduction, and food sovereignty, which is defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (La Via Campesina, 1996), address these questions and increase food security in Hong Kong?
Although well established in the USA and Europe, support of local, organic food as a means to a self-sustaining, secure food supply, is relatively new in HK, given the statement in the December 2014 consultation document, “New Agricultural Policy: Sustainable Agricultural Development in HK”, that local agriculture is not a means of primary production. However, farmers and consumers are increasingly interested in locally produced, organic food either for direct purchase onsite, through farmer’s markets, in restaurants or through modified CSA programs such as Homegrown Foods. But with a total of only 2400 farms (540 classified as organic as of June 2015) on 700 hectares, 3800 hectares considered abandoned farmland and no accounting for the production of rooftop farms, local production was calculated as only 1.9% of fresh vegetables, 79.6% of live poultry and 6.1% of live pigs in 2014.
The Fall 2014 speech by Secretary for Food & Health Dr Ko Wing-man acknowledged that “HK shares APEC’s goal of strengthening food security and fighting against the volatility of food prices”, however increasing the amount of local production was barely mentioned in the consultation document. It focused instead on a matching fund, establishing AgriParks and promoting local agriculture, not with targets for production increase (since a focus on quantity, rather than quality, would go against free market principles), but as a leisure activity that can provide employment and high quality, but low quantities of specialty foods through new technologies. This proposed focus does not acknowledge the potential risk of food unavailability and utilization due to the HK’s reliance on imports, especially from Mainland China, with its food safety issues, lack of hygiene standard enforcement, illegal and harmful food additives and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These issues not only affect the food we eat but also impact the soil, air and water through agricultural run-off and air pollution from chemical manufacturing processes. Add to this cultural practices and inefficiencies in the food chain that lead to 3,337 tonnes/day of food being wasted (EPD, 2012) and ending up incinerated or in landfills, it becomes apparent that the current model of food supply in HK is not sustainable. It is time to support a food sovereignty approach, in combination with local production and food waste reduction, to increase food security in Hong Kong.
editorial
Car-free Sundays: A Hong Kong Edition?
Ming Pao Weekly (in Traditional Chinese)
March 29, 2016
Melissa has published a short editorial in the Hong Kong magazine Ming Pao weekly advocating for the implementation of Car-free Sundays in Hong Kong. The full text is below or you can read it online (in English) here. Also see Yanni Chan’s piece for Hong Kong Magazine “Yes. We Can Have a Walkable Central” for a more in-depth look at the issue.
{image 3
}Umbrella Movement, October 2015 Image credit: Melissa Cate Christ
Can we reoccupy and redesign Hong Kong’s streets to prioritize people over vehicles? It seems we can. For, as demonstrated by the transformation of key vehicular streets into dynamic pedestrian environments during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s urban landscape has the capacity to provide for the needs of a large number of people, from the essential to the environmental to the socio-political. Beyond evaluating the success or failure of the Movement’s political demand for ‘true universal suffrage’, the occupation reinvigorated a cultural awareness regarding Hong Kong’s perpetual spatial inequality and degraded living environment. The Umbrella Movement created a community, composed not just of those who support social and political equality, but also of those who support spatial equality and the possibility of prioritizing people over vehicles as a way to co-create a more liveable and sustainable city. The Movement’s tactical and nuanced occupation and traversal of spaces previously (and now, again) devoted to cars or restricted by rules and regulations to single uses can be seen as a provocative starting point to imagine strategies and tactics for the reprogramming of Hong Kong’s streets. One of those tactics is the re-implementation of car-free stretches of street or highway according to an internationally widespread practice, Car-free Sundays.
The benefits of ‘car-free’ days in Hong Kong have already been proven. Blockading the streets during the Umbrella Movement was a tactic to force negotiation, but it also improved the environment in Hong Kong. Roadside pollution levels dropped over 40% during the protests according to the Clean Air Network, noise levels were significantly lowered and the closed streets became wide communal public spaces – giant sidewalks and plazas that accommodated every kind of pedestrian activity, from walking to skateboarding to eating to studying to sleeping. In addition to the environmental and social benefits, in Admiralty in particular, the ability to cross at grade and to walk or bike from Central to Causeway Bay, opened up a whole new logistical landscape and way to travel through the city which is faster, and more encouraging of a healthy, active lifestyle than the MTR, tram, bus, taxi or private vehicle.
Can Hong Kong design its urban landscape to transform itself into a livable, healthy, walkable city? After this experiment in which a highway became a boulevard, and acknowledging the environmental and social benefits of pedestrianization, can we keep the momentum going to eventually transform Hong Kong’s streets and highways into ‘complete streets’, where safe access for all users is emphasized, where people are given priority over vehicles? In this future city, sidewalks are wider, fences are removed, crosswalks and signaled intersections are installed, roads are narrower, speed limits are lowered and space is made for benches, vegetation and chatting? All these are possible – if we can imagine Connaught or Nathan Road as a pleasant place to walk, other main thoroughfares (such as Caine or Garden Road on Hong Kong Island for a start) could be next.
So to further test the viability of reducing traffic and to increase residents demand for a safe and healthy urban environment in Hong Kong, why not establish car-free Sundays? A weekly event would show Hong Kong’s commitment to improving the living environment of the city.Hong Kong’s public transit network is world famous for its investment model and efficiency, but in order to take the next step towards a sustainable future by reducing the speed, number and trips made by vehicles in the city, including buses, taxis and minibuses, people need to be able to walk, cycle and take other forms of non-motorized transport. Why not repeat every week what has already been shown during the Umbrella Movement: people want to walk from Central to Causeway Bay and that the cessation of vehicular traffic on those barricaded roads significantly improved air quality and significantly reduced noise pollution.
There are precedents around the world for Car-free Sundays, including Jakarta, Seattle, San Francisco and Bogota. Hong Kong would have a number of models to choose from, some of which have led to the conversion of highways into boulevards and the implementation of permanent improvements which lowered speed limits and improved safety and air quality. In others, the closed or reduced streets act as temporary public spaces for festivals and gatherings, cafes, theatres or just chill-out spaces to meet and greet friends and family. With car-free Sundays, the people of Hong Kong would have the opportunity to connect with their neighbors and walk, bike, scoot, rollerblade, stroll, or dance in a pollution-free, spatially equitable environment. Occupying these spaces with people, rather than vehicles, is the first step towards making Hong Kong a truly equitable and liveable city. Its time for Car-free Sundays in Hong Kong.
Drawing credit: Susanne Trumpf. Photo credits: Rooftop Republic
