I see Hong Kong as a model of smart growth management and land use planning. It’s a city were policy dictates that development must concentrate on only 25% of the land area, with the remaining 75% preserved as open space. This policy ensures that the region’s lush green spaces remain intact. It also maintains scarcity and high land values in developable areas. This is crucial to the local government because its primary source of income is land leasing.

Looking at development in Hong Kong through Western eyes, I noticed another impact of the city’s tightly concentrated density: the compact clustering of residential and working populations supports a diverse, competitive, and often ingenious retail community.

My first up-close encounter with the retail streetscape occurred in Tsim Sha Tsui, an upscale neighborhood on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor (map). What struck me most was the extreme permeability at the pedestrian level. Few storefronts at the ground floor, save a handful of banks and higher-end boutiques, have full walls. Separated from the sidewalk by only a few inches of floor height, merchants do business in cheerful cubicle-sized spaces under fluorescent lights while people flow past, around, in and out. Read more…

Hong Kong Island (view from Kowloon), photo: wired-destinations.com.

Our interdisciplinary team, supported by the Runstad Center at the University of Washington, recently went on a research trip to Hong Kong. We were there to view the city through a multifaceted lens, looking to identify success metrics and their outcomes within the built environment. This led us to interview a diverse array of government decision-makers, private developers, investors, consultants, planners, policy-makers, and community representatives. The themes that emerged from our conversations were not quite what we expected in this intensely capitalistic city containing the most skyscrapers in the world. The glittering towers and pulsing streetscapes are on a foundation that is not quite what it seems. Hong Kong, from what we could tell, is at a monumental tipping point. Read more…

 One reason the U.S. government has been pushing for home ownership is because it’s said to reduce turnover and build strong communities. But, as I learned on a recent trip to Hong Kong, there may be other ways to get there.

Some background might be helpful here: In many Asian countries, commercial building landlords don’t finance tenant improvement allowances (the cost of paying for an office or retail tenant to customize their space), the way most do here. Leases are relatively short (often three years, vs our customary five to 10) but tenants tend to stay if the rents are reasonable, after all, they have invested in (and effectively own) an immoveable piece of the asset.

In Hong Kong, as I learned, subsidized housing works in much the same way. Thirty percent of the population lives in government subsidized housing–”Housing Estates”– as they are called. These units are rented out as bare shells. The apartments are essentially concrete boxes with only a skim coat of plaster (and plumbing conduit running on the outside of the building). As a result, the units are less prone to damage and can be more easily cleaned up when tenants change.  

(image: Hong Kong’s Ching Ho Tower, photo: Mark Huppert.) Read more…

The Glass House’s forgotten older brother re-enters the architecture world thanks to a real estate advertisement. The Booth House, Phillip Johnson’s first commissioned home, was recently put on the market by Sirkka Damora, an architect and editor who lived there for fifty five years with her husband Robert, a renowned architectural photographer. So thank you William Raveis Real Estate for reminding the world of its impact. Read more…

Depressing news from Kansas City: USA Today reported on Friday that Dan Rockhill’s celebrated Studio 804 design-build program has been unable to find buyers for its last two houses. As we reported in a feature story last February, Studio 804’s previous houses had attracted waiting lists of potential buyers. Unfortunately, the program moved into more expensive cutting-edge sustainable design—its 2009 house (pictured) earned Platinum LEED certification, and its new passive house is expected to do the same—just as the housing market imploded. Now, according to the USA Today article, Studio 804 is “essentially bankrupt,” with only $25 in its checking account.

Click here for information on how to donate money to Studio 804; to learn more about the program, read Daniel Akst’s feature story, “Platinum at a Price.”

Click the play button to watch our executive editor, Martin C. Pedersen, explain how a 1961 New York City zoning ordinance led to a profusion of “crappy little parks” in his Yorkville neighborhood. (Click here to watch the two previous installments of “My Banal Neighborhood.”)

In 2006, we wrote about Object Orange, a Detroit artists’ collective that was painting some of the city’s abandoned houses Tiggerific orange in an effort to call attention to its rapidly decaying neighborhoods. Last winter, a pair of Detroit artists hit on an even more dramatic method of highlighting the city’s deterioration—Ice House Detroit, “an architectural installation and social change project” by Gregory Holm and Matthew Radune that froze one of the city’s 20,000 abandoned houses in solid ice (which required spraying the house with a fire hose for more than a week.)

Here’s a (rather ominous) video of the final result: Read more…

Warning: the 2009 documentary Casa Bronfman is guaranteed to arouse severe real estate envy in even the most sanguine New Yorkers. The 38-minute film—which is being shown this weekend at the 28th International Festival of Films on Art, in Montreal—takes viewers on a leisurely tour of the Manhattan townhouse of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and family. Their 12,800-square-foot home was designed in the 1990s by the architect Peter Rose (who also designed the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its founder and director, Phyllis Lambert—the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Edgar, Jr.’s grandfather.) Rose took a 1918 townhouse that had been converted into apartments and returned it to a single-family home, organizing the interior around two vertically-stacked central courts. This allowed for ample natural light in the middle of the building—traditionally the darkest part of a New York townhouse—and also created an interesting arrangement of space, with a large semi-private event/entertainment core surrounded by a warren of private family rooms. (And, on top of the lower court, an outdoor garden designed by Dan Kiley.) For a quick tour, check out the three-minute sample of the charming-if-jealousy-inducing film above.

Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s executive editor, Martin Pedersen, deconstruct the “strange, almost mutant form” of a building in his Yorkville, Manhattan, neighborhood—one that appears to have been designed entirely by real estate lawyers. (Click here to watch the first installment of “My Banal Neighborhood.”)

Last month, everyone was talking about Las Vegas’s CityCenter, the $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot hotel-and-entertainment complex that now seems like the last gasp of a rapidly-receding era of starchitect cache and real-estate hubris. Well, not quite the last gasp—this morning another emblem of aughties excess officially opened in the UAE: Adrian Smith and SOM’s Burj Dubai—the world’s tallest building!—rising 160-plus stories above a city-state that is now reeling from plummeting property values and crippling debt.

Related: In 2007, Stephen Zacks took a look at the serious ambitions behind Dubai’s insane rate of development in “Beyond the Spectacle.”