Having started to take in Sham Shui Po, I had been looking at maps last night and became interested in trying to see just how far Sham Shui Po lies from the existing waterfront. This tied back to my ideas about connecting the rooftop level with the water level, and juxtaposing rooftop slum conditions with fishing village conditions.
I began my morning by walking from Apliu Street and the MTR station towards the water. As I got further from central Sham Shui Po, the mood changed completely. Compared to the hustling and bustling city center, the area between Lai Chi Kok Rd and the West Kowloon Corridor was almost dead. It was very evident that on the street level this was a quieter, less visited part of town; but in its upper level conditions it was still very much connected with the character of central Sham Shui Po and had rooftop slums visible on almost every block. Located on the borderline between the West Kowloon Corridor underpass that separates Sham Shui Po from a retirement development, a few parks, and the waterfront; these nine blocks of Sham Shui Po became of great interest to me. They express the different building typologies consistent with rooftop slum communities, contain a few urban renewal projects, and create a nice compare and contrast condition to central Sham Shui Po. I enjoyed the potential of being able to create a neighborhood feel in these nine blocks, while still trying to bridge the divide between them and the chaos of central Sham Shui Po.
The sectional change from the last block of Sham Shui Po, to the underpass of West Kowloon Corridor, and the Tung Chao Street Park reminded me of our David Grahame workshop and the idea of hidden heterotopias. Beneath this bridge is a local market that is seemingly unvisited, a true pity for such a beautiful space. As you enter the park and look back, you can see the rooftop slums peeking over the underpass: a nice image of transportation and infrastructural development versus poverty and slum conditions.
The Underpass Condition | Sham Shui Po Boundary
From here, I continued my walk towards the waterfront leaving behind Sham Shui Po and having to take several detours to gain access to the harbor. It was obvious that this is not a connection that designers ever wanted to establish as you pass through two parks winding through paths and then take a sky walkway across another highway and finally make your way to the waterfront which is very industrial and void of people.
To find your way back, you must go below ground and through the Nam Cheong MTR station to head towards the central streets of Sham Shui Po. The boundary between Sham Shui Po and the water is clearly defined as a transportation route given to North-South access along Kowloon rather than East-West access for local residents to the harbor.
Having experienced the inaccessibility of the waterfront, I made my way back to Sham Shui Po to meet up for the meeting I had arranged to visit one of the rooftop communities. I had already tried a few times to make my way up random staircases in Sham Shui Po to gain accessibility to the rooftops, but I was either stopped by locals getting angry with me as I was intruding on their personal space.
Rooftops at Night
The rooftop visit was quite eye-opening and reaffirmed a lot of the information I had received via the book from Stefan Canham and Rufina Wu. However, being there in person also made me see the rooftop communities differently than how I had seen them when I left. My first models of the rooftops were quite abstract, open floor plans of the density. But being there in person you realize that this density continues into the tightness of the corridors through which you pass to gain access to each home. I also noticed that the materiality of each rooftop slum is almost uniform made of sheet metal, not of a variety of different materials as I had first interpreted. In addition, my research had made it appear that per rooftop, the size of slum homes is quite uniform. However, the variance in size of rooms on each rooftop is quite large, with some being two or three times the size of others. We also learned on our visit that residents share communal bathrooms and kitchens amongst one another such that their home is normally simply one large room with a refrigerator and small table on one side and a bed and smaller furniture on the other. But the biggest impression I got from the visit was that the corridors and 3-d quality of the rooftop slum communities is that it is like entering into dark tunnels with small bits of light directing you to the entries to each slum unit. In a way, it made me think of what I have always thought it would be like to visit the Thermal Baths in Vals by Peter Zumthor. There was something unique about this space and the contrast between light and dark that I enjoyed greatly. Perhaps this was only because we visited at night, but I definitely want to try to capture this feeling in a model or drawing to express what I felt when walking through the community.
As the day came to a close, we left the rooftop slums and went to Causeway Bay to join the rest of the Urban Design course and watch the horse races at Happy Valley. Having left one of the most extreme spaces of poverty I think anyone can experience in Hong Kong, and moving into a completely separate world of wealth and foreigners was a strange feeling. Happy Valley was almost all Americans or English speakers, or wealthy Chinese men gambling on horse races : I felt a bit disgusted that this type of disparity could exist so blatantly.
No comments:
Post a Comment