Future

“Yes, this is where the really rich live, these houses are super expensive,” Ian explained from the passenger seat as the cab driver twisted his taxi up the mountain through a series of paperclip bends in the road. “They’re probably multi-million now.”

From the backseat I mused on this nugget of real estate information. Instinctively, my assumptions turned around a temporal dial. This is valuable land now, with a booming Hong Kong defying the global economic downturn, a growing tourist trade and the city’s new rank as the global leader in international finance, property values in the rarified mountain air at the top of the island must still be climbing.

But Ian isn’t talking about time. The “now” he is referring to is a spatial one. Here. As we climb the plots become larger, wider, fatter. They spread out across two flat dimensions, houses stilted against the steep rocks with a confidence impossible to find in the jungle of cement closer to the island’s coast. The higher we go, the more bloated they become.

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world. The average worker commutes to the 14^th floor on a daily basis. There are more buildings over 300 feet tall here than anywhere in the world. More than 7500 skyscrapers illuminate the city at night, many squeezed into the 1.3 km of flat land cushioning the island’s steep hill from the harbor waves. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth: one sq. mile holds an average of 16,500 people. In the vertical city height is democratic. It is the common factor bonding individual geography. It’s the two dimensional measure that separates the haves from the have-nots in this future city.

Up here, en route to The Peak, along the surreal inclined highway that twists its way through a megalopolis’s beating heart, the status of altitude is a given. The view north is one of the most spectacular affirmations of human potential. Directed towards Kowloon, and onward to Mainland China, the island proclaims itself, an illuminated testament of status and economic might. That view is available to anyone, thanks to a observation deck (and gleaming aerial shopping center) linked by tram to central Hong Kong; but to get here you must play along, joining the breathing, sweating, shouting masses crammed into the single public viewing space. We can all look down on the city, we just have to do it together.

As the car flexes against the asphalt, turning in and up and moaning against the road’s pitch, apartment windows stream by, glass windows that look directly onto a twisting mountain turnpike, everything following each other up. Up from the water, up from the street, climbing the hill to look down.

Hong Kong Island rises 552 feet from the South China Sea. Its first settlers spread themselves out across the coves and inlets scattered across the harbor, and when the British colonized the Fragrant Harbor they established Victoria City as a free port of Her Majesty’s Empire.  Now the beating heart of the city is the strip of flat land between the base of Mt. Victoria and the northern coast. Here the titanic steel and glass testaments to human potential project their grandeur over the water to the mainland. Impossibly bright signage streams out through the night air as colorful LEDs flash like psychedelic nightdresses down the tall figures. Some flashy, some embossed with minimalist glamour, others a garish command to acknowledge sheer size. Amidst this commercial jungle the freckled incandescence of block-like apartments soar to near-equal heights. Everyone lives on the 26^th or 47^th or 13^th floor. The elevator is the common residential denominator.

 

This is the future. When space is limited, we have to grow up instead of out. Hong Kong has been practicing for years. The prevalence of vertical thinking extends beyond solitary buildings. Motion across the city is directed by constant shifts in elevation as well. Gleaming labyrinths of air-conditioned chrome coat underground pedestrian malls linked one to another along moving sidewalks that parallel the avenues overhead. Above the car-choked pavement, sky bridges direct a maze of second floor foot traffic between the ubiquitous mega-buildings as escalators, elevators and twisting staircases establish continuity between levels. As you walk from one point to another, you move and plan in three dimensions. Every citizen and visitor is concerned with the vertical. No one is limited to the starting plane. 

It’s not as though the city has run out of land faster than anywhere else, although, as an amoeboid collection of islands and inlets, it’s bound to run into the constrains of natural scarcity eventually. Instead, the current climate is one of imposed scarcity. Only 25% of Hong Kong is developed, with 40% of the remaining land reserved for public green space. The government owns the deed to every parcel of land in the territory, merely leasing plots to private users, and is very deliberate in how and when these are parceled out. This helps to drive up property values, to what have been called exaggerated prices, and generates a substantial corresponding tax base; it also ensures that any new building will take full advantage of its two dimensional height by asserting itself strongly in the third.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the constant and (it seems) inevitable rise of skyscrapers has created a tangle of contained ideologies all screaming for attention. Some search for it through design, others through signage, some through height. In the past fifteen years, the title of tallest building in the world has shifted three times; while Hong Kong has never held the title, two of the top fifteen now look at each other across the harbor, the precipitously named International Finance Center on the Island and International Commerce Center on the peninsula of reclaimed land jutting from Kowloon.

 

Their beauty, their grandiose illumination of the night sky, it’s shocking, inspiring, and all directed at a single purpose – the distribution of information. The buildings are messages, broadcasting through the air, sending meaning across the water. SAMSUNG, Sharp, HSBC: mega corporations shoot their names through the night sky in a flamboyant display of color. Others, like the IFC, try to force themselves into their observers’ minds, to subjugate via an enormous flashing steel phallus. The most impressive buildings rely on swag, and the Bank of China Tower is the O.G. of the Honk Kong skyline.

 

All of this is to say that nothing is understated. The universal presence of immense height, constant vertical motion, shock and awe aerial advertising, claustrophobic encounters at every turn – this city is a different animal. When two-dimensional personal space is diminished we catch a glimpse of the future.

In Hong Kong that future is recorded, all the time, every day. CCTV follows every taxi, watches every crosswalk, monitors the entrance in every building. All that video – where does it go? Is there a database of human behavior stored somewhere in an underground bunker in Hong Kong? A place where the movements of an 8 million person metropolis is analyzed bit by bit, turning citizens into discrete packets that can be coded, manipulated, fed into the algorithm of information distribution.

Hong Kong is a beautiful city; it is pristine in a way that 8 million people never should be. Part of the reason behind this is fear – citizen manipulation. There are no cigarette butts on the street because it carries a $5000 fine (Hong Kong Dollars). No one spits for the same reason. In a city run by money, every action has a price. But every coin has two sides. And with a prodigious surplus, the administration of Hong Kong can do things like build accessible public toilets across the entire city, do away with museum admission costs, and make transportation clean, efficient and cheap.

There is a palpable tension between the quality of life and the obvious (semi-) authoritarian rule by elite. Keep the people happy ($6000 checks for every citizen sound nice?) and you can do whatever you want. Meticulous planning is possible when a rarified bunch wields the real power – the ones that can afford to live in two dimensions.