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[STATEMENT]
Automobiles and roads are zipper if cities is a piece of fabric.
Today it has been unzipped, the objective of this thesis is to study how to zip and what will happen after zipping.
This thesis examines the possibilities of removing automobiles and roads in a city (district).
 — An imagination of unzipped city
Source: Hurakan Yeung
[WHAT]
Street existed in the pre-Greco-Roman era.
“Streets of all types, in cities new and old, are the most immediate and ubiquitous public spaces that support myriad cultural, economic, political and social activities.”
— Vikas Mehta
 — A souk in Middle East – shops anchored to the colonnade spill over to create a street bazaar
Source: Souk el-Arwam, Damascus (Esh-Sham). G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Streets allow us to experience the places we pass through in the present.
Streets also provide opportunities for cultural, economic, political and social behaviors or activities.
From the very beginning to contemporary society, human is still pursuing of higher speed and more convenience. They were pursuing the speed from countries to countries , cities to cities, buildings to buildings, even units to units. If looking into the city scale– buildings, streets and roads, the high dense cities, for example Hong Kong, the first consideration was planned for transportation,and then how to maximize building area and minimize street space.
While a transportation system increases its speed, it requires more lands.
Not only the road lands increases, the lands for parking also increases.
This is one of the reasons to minimize street space. And the fact is it has been compressed to almost disappear in Hong Kong.
 — As traffic increases its speed it requires greater buffer zone front, back and side which requires greater space to move the same number of cars
Source: Towards an Eco-city : calming the traffic (Sydney, NSW: Envirobook, 1992), P.44
 — The spreading zone-of-influence. As volume and speed of traffic increase, home territory is progressively eroded
Source: Towards an Eco-city : calming the traffic (Sydney, NSW: Envirobook, 1992), P.52-53
Today’s Hong Kong, if we want to go to space B from space A, the transportation always exists in-between two spaces. We will experience both space A and B but not the space in-between them. Roads and automobiles disconnect us to the opportunities of experience. We lost the chances of walking in the streets because the they were replaced by roads.
 — Pedestrians are walking on the sky; Automobiles and roads are taking most space of the ground
Source: Hong Kong Thru My Eyes, http://hongkongthrumyeyes.com/
“Air pollution levels in Central and Causeway Bay violated global health and safety standards for almost 280 days in the past year, with Des Voeux Road and Hennessy Road experiencing the worst levels of fine particulate matter on Hong Kong Island, a new study has found. …
Simon Ng warned that hundreds of thousands of people were being exposed to roadside pollution every day, citing a recent University of Hong Kong study that confirmed PM2.5 led to a higher death rate among elderly people by increasing their risk of developing cardiovascular problems.”
— Source: Air pollution in Central and Causeway Bay exceeds WHO levels 280 days in a year, SCMP, 30 April, 2015
Furthermore, automobiles and roads relevance to human health and the environment in two ways, pollution and lack of exercises. While Hong Kong people is talking about lack of time to do exercises cause a lot of health issues. But most of them are using 15 to 60 for their commute to work and there is a double time for around-trip everyday.
Besides, according to the survey by transport department, most districts in Hong Kong are less than 50% “self-containment”. That means most residents are not working in their walkable distance.
— Distribution of Journey Time
Source: Travel Characteristics Survey 2011 Final Report, Hong Kong Transport Department, 2014
— Comparison of Self-Containment by Area in 2002 and 2011
Source: Travel Characteristics Survey 2011 Final Report, Hong Kong Transport Department, 2014
[WHY]
“There is no magic in simply removing cars from downtown, and certainly none in stressing peace, quiet, and dead space. The removal of the cars is important only because of the great opportunities it opens to make the streets work harder and to keep downtown (read: urban) activities compact and concentrated. ……. The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before-not less so.”
— Jane Jacobs
According to the Hong Kong Government Policy Address 2015 and 2016, they are seeking more usable lands or other solutions for future development, included residential and commercial uses.
The below diagram is showing a possibility of usable land— roads.
Using Mongkok as an example, the walking time from north to south is 21 minutes. It is an acceptable walking distance. By simple calculation and ignore the car parks in this district, there is over 50% of land is road.
— Mongkok as a walkable district and 50% road
Source: Hurakan Yeung
By returning roads to be streets, we can immediately solve the serious problem of lands lacking. And it is not only turning back to be the old picture of streets. It will be a new form of streets which is a combination of residential, commercial, cultural, political and social spaces.
And also helping to solve the health and pollution problems.
“The street . . . the only valid field of experience.”
— André Breton
“Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.”
— Jane Jacobs
[HOW]
Site:
The site(s) would be in Hong Kong.
It(they) would be any districts are facing pollution, lands lacking, high dense living, long commute, or any undiscovered potential issues.
Analysis:
– Layers of automobiles / roads / transportation systems
– Limitation of reamoving all vehicles, eg. emergency cars
– Pros and cons of street experience / pollution / health / lands releasing
Research:
– There are more than 200 car-free / limited vehicles intrude places in the world. there are more than 2,000,000 popution in total
– examples: Superblock in Barcelona, Cheung Chau in Hong Kong, Tripoli in Lebanon, Ouagadougou in Africa, etc
– source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places
Strategy:
Through redesign the planning regulations/ lease conditions/ building codes to achieve.
Design Scale:
The thesis would focus not only in the street/building scale, also focus the district/city scale to see how the entire system works. Besides, the human/detail scale would be concerned to see how it reflects the core discourse.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY]
– Vikas Mehta, The Street : a quintessential social public space (New York: Routledge, 2013)
– David Engwicht, Towards an Eco-city : calming the traffic (Sydney, NSW: Envirobook, 1992)
– J.H. Crawford; foreword by James Howard Kunstler, Carfree Cities (Utrecht: International Books, 2000)
– J.H. Crawford; foreword by Stavros Dimas, Carfree Design Manual (Utrecht: International Books, 2009)
– David Sucher, City Comforts : how to build an urban village (Seattle: City Comforts, 2003)
– Michael Sorkin, Local code : The constitution of a city at 42 degrees North latitude (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993)
– Imes Chiu, The evolution from horse to automobile : a comparative international study (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2008)
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961)
– Hong Kong Transport Department, Travel Characteristics Survey 2011 Final Report (HK Gov., 2014)
– “Air pollution in Central and Causeway Bay exceeds WHO levels 280 days in a year”, last modified 01 May, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1781677/air-pollution-central-and-causeway-bay-exceeds-who
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