Taken in a public housing estate, these three photos I took, along with several others, for a photo contest themed on "caring and support". I picked the upper one and sent it with another four different photos for submission. The photo tells of the architect's thoughtfulness to put in metal seats every twenty steps along the 200-metre walkway for the elderly tenants' sake.In Hong Kong, about one-third of the population live in these publicly subsidised housing estate, which were initiated by the former British colonial administration following a notorious great fire in a shanty town at Shek Kip Mei (literally, Rocky Gorge End) in 1953. At that time, masses of refugees fled from the civil war in China to take refuge in Hong Kong, only to find themselves among broken bricks and half-collapsed walls – hopeless and homeless. As time wore on, the shanty towns became home to 300,000 people, almost a quarter of the whole population.
(Shek Kip Mei shanty town: "In those days, we were neighbours to rats and cockroaches. Inside and outside the house, they were just all over the place, running in all directions," a fomrer squatter recalled.)
The Shek Kip Mei fire was not catastrophic, but in three years time, one-tenth of the squatters was made homeless because of fire. It gave the British a big headache and the public housing estate was the cure.(At that time, the English-speaking class lived on the mid-levels of Hong Kong Island, a cooler place to stay away from the heat and humidity of summer and a "cool" place to stay away from the poor. Today, the Mid-Levels is still an up-market residential area for the rich and famous.)
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