Hong Kong's growing network of walkways
It's possible to travel across parts of Hong Kong without ever touching the pavement
Depending on where you live in Hong Kong, you could walk to work, stop off afterwards to pick up groceries, have a jacket made and then head home without leaving the comfort of an air-conditioned environment; you can even make your way to the airport, catch a flight and return home without having to set foot on any Hong Kong pavement, as garment exporter Ivan Tang has done.
"I live in Harbour Green in Olympic and went to Beijing recently. I just went straight from my building over a bridge to Olympic station, took a train to Kowloon station, then the airport express to the airport," he says.
With an estimated 2,354 skyscrapers above 100 metres tall, Hong Kong is the quintessential vertical metropolis. It has more tall towers than New York City (794) and Tokyo (556) and more than 6,500 high-rise buildings, mostly crowded around commercial and transport hubs. A huge network of walkways, overpasses and tunnels links this dense forest of skyscrapers. They are documented in by American Jonathan Solomon, who taught at the University of Hong Kong, with fellow architects Adam Frampton and Clara Wong.
The book, which was launched in London last month, reveals another dimension of our city. It is an exploration of Hong Kong's extensive pedestrian infrastructure and the relationship between public and private space, illustrated by a series of brightly coloured, if sometimes befuddling, maps.
A short pedestrian bridge linking the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Prince's Building started the ball rolling. Built in 1965 by Hongkong Land, it was there to channel wealthy visitors from the hotel to the high-end shops across the street. Its immediate success encouraged other developers to follow suit and the interconnecting passages have spread across the city.
The book maps 32 routes in Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories. Solomon's favourite is an urban hike of just over two kilometres that extends from the mega-developments around Olympic station, over bustling Mong Kok stalls to the tranquil Yuen Po Street Bird Garden in Prince Edward.
