urban development, planning history, urban history

The Making of Hong Kong

Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz and Thomas Kvan
19 Aug 2014

With its island origins, skyscraper skyline and world city status, Hong Kong is often likened to New York. However the comparison soon falters with the realization that Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are only the more visible aspect of a far more complex urban condition. A steep and contorted terrain has ensured that built-up areas are compact, rich in spatial experience, rarely far from hills and water; and connected by an array of public transport that is second to none.

The three authors of The Making of Hong Kong see value in these conditions – a metropolis with a small urban footprint, 90 per cent use of public transport for vehicular journeys, and proximity to nature. Though the compact city is a model that is frequently advocated by urban thinkers, it is one rarely encountered. Here, the evolution of Hong Kong’s intense urbanism is traced from the region’s pre-colonial walled settlements and colonial shop-houses to the contemporary vertical and volumetric metropolis of towers, podia-and-towers, decks, bridges, escalators and other components of multi-level city living. On a site bedevilled by an acute shortage of flat land, Hong Kong is portrayed as the ‘accidental pioneer of a new kind of urbanism’ that commands the thoughtful attention of a wider world.

Barrie Shelton is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Justyna Karakiewicz is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Thomas Kvan is Professor and Dean in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Contents

  • 1. A State of IntenCity
  • 2. Precedents
  • 3. Long, Low and Intense: From Possession Point to World War II
  • 4. Massing and Rising: The Post-War Decades
  • 5. Vertical and Volumetric: Post 1980
  • 6. Podium and Tower
  • 7. Emerging Volumetric: Components
  • 8. Conclusion: Vertical and Volumetric
  • Addendum: Advancing the Volumetric on Old District and New Territory Sites

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urban development, markets

Marketplaces as an Urban Development Strategy

About this issue

Issue number
151 pages
For more info download the flyer
Format: PDF 1744719KB

Summary

The editors’ ambition in this issue is to stimulate a useful and collaborative conversation – amongst academics as well as planners and designers...

Guest editors: Freek Janssens and Ceren Sezer
18 Mar 2014

Marketplaces are a great deal more than the commercial gathering places that city authorities sometimes take them to be. They are flexible spatial and temporal organizations that provide vivid and inclusive public spaces. As sites of intereactions of flows of people, goods and information, they facilitate an improvised and spontaneous synergy of people and communities, which is at the core of the everyday life of the city.

The editors’ ambition in this issue is to stimulate a useful and collaborative conversation – amongst academics as well as planners and designers – on the role that marketplaces can play in today’s cities.

Contents

urban development, planning history, urban history

The Making of Hong Kong

Barrie Shelton, Justyna Karakiewicz and Thomas Kvan
13 Nov 2010

With its island origins, skyscraper skyline and world city status, Hong Kong is often likened to New York. However the comparison soon falters with the realization that Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are only the more visible aspect of a far more complex urban condition. A steep and contorted terrain has ensured that built-up areas are compact, rich in spatial experience, rarely far from hills and water; and connected by an array of public transport that is second to none.

The three authors of The Making of Hong Kong see value in these conditions – a metropolis with a small urban footprint, 90 per cent use of public transport for vehicular journeys, and proximity to nature. Though the compact city is a model that is frequently advocated by urban thinkers, it is one rarely encountered. Here, the evolution of Hong Kong’s intense urbanism is traced from the region’s pre-colonial walled settlements and colonial shop-houses to the contemporary vertical and volumetric metropolis of towers, podia-and-towers, decks, bridges, escalators and other components of multi-level city living. On a site bedevilled by an acute shortage of flat land, Hong Kong is portrayed as the ‘accidental pioneer of a new kind of urbanism’ that commands the thoughtful attention of a wider world.

Barrie Shelton is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Justyna Karakiewicz is Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Thomas Kvan is Professor and Dean in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne

Contents

1. A State of IntenCity

2. Precedents

3. Long, Low and Intense: From Possession Point to World War II

4. Massing and Rising: The Post-War Decades

5. Vertical and Volumetric: Post 1980

6. Podium and Tower

7. Emerging Volumetric: Components

8. Conclusion: Vertical and Volumetric

Addendum: Advancing the Volumetric on Old District and New Territory Sites

You are viewing the hardback edition — View the paperback edition

Stockholm, urban development

Stockholm: The Making of a Metropolis

In this unique study of the Swedish capital, Thomas Hall focuses on the phases of development which shaped the Stockholm of
the twenty-first century, and whose impacts can be clearly read in today’s urban environment, often interwoven with each other.
 
Following the emergence of the medieval city in the thirteenth century, the first major extension of the city in the mid-seventeenth century sought to transform Stockholm into the ‘Paris of the North’. For two hundred years development was unremarkable until the Lindhagen plan of 1866 set out to create a healthier, more beautiful, better functioning, and much larger city. The next phases in the city’s development saw the consolidation of the city centre and the coming of the suburbs, but it was reconstruction of Stockholm city centre in the 1950s and 1960s that must surely be one of Europe’s largest and most radical urban development projects. Finally, the densification process that characterized the last decades of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, revealed a radical change in the architectural idiom in the city – the breakthrough of postmodernism.
 
Throughout, and with the help of superb illustrations, Thomas Hall compares the various periods and plans with each other and
with developments in other European capital cities.
 

Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Stockholm - A Planned City?
2. The Capital of a Great Power
3. The Lindhagen Plan: A Vision Realized
4. The Completion of the Inner City, 1900-1940
5. The Coming of the Outer City: From Enskede to Skarpnäck
6 ‘A Display Window for Sweden’: The Rise and Fall of the City-Centre Reconstruction
7. Concluding Reflections:
A Look Back at Aspects of Stockholm's Development
Stockholm in the New Millennium; Controversial
Metropolitan Icons: Tall Buildings in the Stockholm Cityscape by Martin Rörby
Bibliography