The photographs in this slideshow examine zones of contact between the multilevel metropolis and the mountain. Rocks and soils that in other cities would be buried or obscured are here integral to the setting. The terrain that weaves between streets, through public spaces, and beneath buildings reminds observers of the tenuous relation between the city and its geology. To guard against landslides, the most precipitous grades are stabilized by engineers and classified within a government database that contains 60,000 registered slopes. This is a serious enterprise, with official plates identifying the geotechnical compliance of each slope. Engineering solutions vary from simple block retaining walls to more elaborate structures with anchors, scaffoldings, high tensile wires, and ferro-cement. They constitute a topographic image of the island.

The most precipitous grades are classified within a government database that contains 60,000 registered slopes.

These slopes are frequently put to civic use. Usable land is so scarce that community functions are shoehorned into the engineered hillsides: miniature pocket parks, vertical gardens, seating nooks, bus stops, even ultra-compact municipal storage depots. For flatlanders who are accustomed to cities built on floodplains, this is a novel arrangement. When analyzed in the traditional plan view, Hong Kong’s pocket spaces do not fit conventional templates for good urban legibility, accessibility, repetition, structure, or form. Often, you cannot see from one element to the next, nestled above or below. And yet, the assemblage works. It meets the higher goals of urban design: distinctiveness, variation, and responsiveness to place.

With infrastructure now stretched in urbanist discourse to refer to benches, cell towers, and almost anything multiplied across the city, the term has lost some of its potency. We ought to consider the root of the word — infra meaning below — and look carefully at the structures of the city that are underfoot. Hong Kong’s system of 60,000 registered slopes is a genuine landscape infrastructure that underlies the city, and that grounds the social and physical experiences we have there.

Notes