Illusions of Mountains, Waters and Guildelines

^The photo was taken at midday when the low winter sun shone almost 45 degree into the window. The sunlight was on a fairly high ka level, whitewashing everything on earth which was the least flattering to a photographer. That is exactly when the WB Correction function of GX200 comes in handy, allowing the user to counterbalance the undesirable light source. Here the WB was corrected to cyan.

The few pictures here give you a real sense of how densely built Hong Kong is. This is a view from a high point on Kowloon (actually the height of almost 40th floor). The ranges in the background are the mountains on Hong Kong Island. People living in Hong Kong may feel nothing special about the mountains and the harbour. But they do the populated Hong Kong a big favour.

^Here you actually see the old Mongkok/ Yaumatei area cramped with pre-WWII buildings and newer concrete towers, donning the area with a hap-hazard kind of development outlook. Paradoxically, it is the untidiness which adds a interestingly tipsy quality to the place on street level, especially when at night you feel really tipsy bumping into a hooker or two in this notorious red light district.

With the mountains clustering as the backdrops and the harbour breaking the land, Hong Kong looks much less jam-packed with buildings as it actually is.

The illusion works quite well, doesn't it? But we can't live on an illusion. Something must be done about the crampy building style in Hong Kong.

^People living lower than 30th or 40th floor can't enjoy much of a view beyond the farcades of the buildings flanking theirs.

Actually, there is an Urban Design Guildelines for Hong Kong issued by the government. One of the guiding principle to preserve what it calls the view corridors to the harbour and the mountains is restricting the height of buildings. Sadly, in the Hong Kong context, the principle is set out in a sarcastic way.

It is fine that the government has designated some vantage points from which the stripes of land stretch towards the harbour and the mountains are the view corridors. But this is simply turned into a joke as the Guidelines state that areas within the view corridors may have allowable heights ranging between 30 to 40 storeys (boo!) in the waterfront and above 60 sotreys (boo! boo!) inland! Areas outside the view corridors could have no height restrictions (boo! boo! boo!).

As if these are not enough to sink the lands of Hong Kong, the government allows super skyscrappers to be built in what it calls high rise nodes, as what you can see at the southern and western tips of the Kowloon peninsula fronting the harbour and most of the waterfront areas on the Hong Kong Island !

I gather that high rise node is a fancy name to cover up some policy slips which make it possible for the super skyscrappers to exist.

Now, we have another illusion (of the guidelines) to make the first illusion (afforded by the mountains and the waters) as long as can be. That's truly illusory.