m a l l

c i t y
Hong Kong’s Dreamworlds of Consumption

Edited By Stefan Al
© 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press

Published for distribution in Asia by

Hong Kong University Press
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
www.hkupress.org

ISBN 978-988-8208-96-8 (Paperback)

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS x

INTRODUCTION 1
Mall City: Hong Kong’s DreamWorlds of Consumption
Stefan Al

Part 1 : ESSAYS
1. Predisposed towards Mall Cities 23
Barrie Shelton

2. A Short History of Hong Kong Malls and Towers 35

David Grahame Shane

3. The Rise of Tall Podia and Vertical Malls 53

Tung-Yiu Stan Lai

4. Restructuring Urban Space: The Mall in Mixed-Use 65

Developments
Carolyn Cartier

5. Mall Cities in Hong Kong: Chungking Mansions 73

Gordon Mathews

6. Narrating the Mall City 83

Cecilia L. Chu

7. It Makes a Village 93
Jonathan D. Solomon

Part 2 : Catalog
The Prescience of Malls: A GLIMPSE INSIDE OF HONG KONG’S 109
UNIQUE “PUBLIC” SPACES
Adam Nowek

Footprints 128

Cross-sections 130

312 Malls in Hong Kong 132

17 Mall City Case Studies 134

F.A.R. (Floor Area Ratio) 136

Blank Wall Ratio 138

Type 1: Residential / Commercial
CHUNGKING MANSIONS 144

Type 2: Mall / Residential

GOLDEN SHOPPING CENTRE 148
TUEN MUN TOWN PLAZA 152
LOK FU PLAZA 158
CITYWALK 160

Type 3 : Mall / Office

Sino Centre 166
Argyle Centre 170
The Landmark 176
Shun Tak Centre 182
Times Square 188
Megabox 194

Type 4 : Hybrid
Harbour City 200
Cityplaza 206
Pacific Place 210
IFC 216
Langham Place 222
Elements 228

Credits 234
Contributors

Stefan Al is an associate professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author
of The Strip: Las Vegas Architecture and America (2017), and edited a number of books including
Factory Towns of South China: An Illustrated Guidebook (2012) and Villages in the City: A Guide to South
China’s Informal Settlements (2014). Besides his academic career, Al worked as a practicing architect on
projects including the 600-meter-tall Canton Tower in Guangzhou, and served as an advisor to Hong
Kong government’s Harbourfront Commission and Environment Bureau.

Carolyn Cartier is a professor of Human Geography and China Studies at the University of Technology,
Sydney. She is the author of Globalizing South China (2001) and the co-editor of The Chinese Diaspora:
Space, Place, Mobility and Identity (2003) and Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives
on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes (2005). Her article in Urban Geography, “Production/
Consumption and the Chinese City/Region: Cultural Political Economy and the Feminist Diamond
Ring” (2009) develops a gendered perspective on urban restructuring and luxury consumerism in Hong
Kong and China. She is working on a book on consumerism, urban change, and the Hong Kong–China
relationship.

Cecilia L. Chu is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the
University of Hong Kong (HKU). Her research interests include history and theory of architecture and
urbanism, cultural landscape studies, heritage conservation, and interdisciplinary approaches to the
study of the built environment. Before joining HKU, Chu taught at the Department of Architecture at
the University of California in Berkeley, the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
and the Architectural Conservation Programme at the University of Hong Kong. She has also been
involved with several NGOs on policy research relating to urban design and urban conservation.
Her writings have been published in several academic journals, including Urban Studies, Habitat
International, Design Issues, Journal of Historical Geography, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements
Review, and Geoforum.

Tung-Yiu Stan Lai is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture, Chu Hai College of
Higher Education (CHARCH). Lai completed his PhD at the University of Hong Kong. He is a specialist in
urban morphology of historic market towns and buildings. His teaching focuses on sustainable design
in urban environments, modern architectural theories, and the history of Chinese and Hong Kong
architecture. His research interests cover various architectural types ranging from walled villages, cha
chaan teng (Hong Kong–style cafés), shopping malls, and cinemas to multilevel transportation systems.
Lai has frequently been invited by universities, NGOs, museums, and various high-profile institutions
around the world to present his research. He has authored a broad range of academic papers on
topics such as “From Resistance to Participation: Clanship and Urban Modernization in the Wuyi Rural
Market Towns during the Republican Era,” “The Architectural and Urban Transformation of Yau Ma Tei
Wholesale Fruit Market,” “Eisenstein and Moving Street: From Filmic Montage to Architectural Space,”
“Mapping the Geographical Distribution of Duanfen Markets,” and “Social and Religious Space: The
Central Axis of Nga Tsin Wai Village.”

Gordon Mathews is a professor and chair of the Anthropology Department at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong. He is the author of What Makes Life Worth Living: How Japanese and Americans Make
Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural
Supermarket (2001), Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (with Eric Ma and Tai-lok Lui,
2008), and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011). He has also
edited a number of books, including Japan’s Changing Generations: Are Young People Creating a New
Society? (with Bruce White, 2004), Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective
 xi

(with Carolina Izquierdo, 2009), and Globalization from Below: The World’s Other Economy (with
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Carlos Alba Vega, 2012). He has been teaching a class of asylum seekers every
week in Chungking Mansions.

Adam Nowek is an urban researcher and architectural photographer. His primary areas of research are
Vancouverism, pop-up city-making, and high-rise residential architecture. In 2014, Adam edited Pop-Up
City: City-Making in a Fluid World by BIS Publishers. His photography focuses on comparative studies of
architectural typologies and documenting urban spaces in transition.

David Grahame Shane studied architecture at the Architectural Association, London, and graduated in
1969. He continued to study for MArch in Urban Design (1971) and then PhD in Architectural and Urban
History (1978) with Colin Rowe at Cornell University. He taught Graduate Urban Design at Columbia
University and Town Planning at Cooper Union from 1992 to 2012. He is a visiting professor at the
Polytechnic in Milan, and has participated in the Urban Design PhD program at the University of Venice
since 2000. This fall he taught the Landscape Urbanism PhD program at Copenhagen University in
Aarhus, Denmark. He has lectured widely and published in architectural journals in Europe, the United
States, and Asia. He co-edited with Brian McGrath Sensing the 21st Century City: Close-Up and Remote
(November 2005). He is the author of Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture,
Urban Design and City Theory (2005) and Urban Design Since 1945: A Global Perspective (2011). His most
recent publication is Block, Superblock and Megablock: A Short History (2014).

Barrie Shelton is an honorary associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning,
the University of Sydney, where he earlier directed urban design programs. His expertise is in urban
morphology, history, theory, and design, following an education that spanned from planning,
geography to architecture. He has a special interest in East Asian culture and built form, which is
reflected in his recent books: Learning from the Japanese City: Looking East in Urban Design (2012),
the expanded Japanese version, Nihon no toshi kara manabu koto (2014), and the co-authored The
Making of Hong Kong: From Vertical to Volumetric (2011). Shelton has been a Japan Foundation Fellow,
a visiting professor at English and Japanese universities, and an associate professor specializing
in urban design at the Universities of Melbourne and Tasmania. For more information, see http://
urbantransmedia.blogspot.com.au/.

Jonathan D. Solomon is director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed
Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and editor of the art and design journal Forty-Five.
His recent book, Cities without Ground, was reviewed by publications including The Wall Street Journal,
The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. Solomon had edited the influential series 306090 Books for over a
decade and served as curator of the US Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. Solomon
holds a BA from Columbia University and a MArch from Princeton University, and is a licensed architect
in the State of Illinois.
 1

IntroDuction
MALL CITY: HONG KONG’S DREAMWORLDS OF CONSUMPTION

Stefan Al

Hong Kong is a city of malls. With about one mall per square mile it is
the world’s mall–densest place,1 only trailed by Singapore, the other
consumer–oriented city–state.2 This immense mall concentration is
proof that retail lies at the core of Hong Kong’s urban economy, with
most people employed in the retail and wholesale sector—about one in
four people, compared to New York where the sector employs one in
nine.3 Shopping alone is seen as a valid reason for a visit to the city that
for decades has enjoyed the reputation as “Asia’s Shopping Paradise.”
A place where all brands can be found and fakes can be avoided, Hong
Kong has become the retail destination for China, the fastest growing
consumer market on earth. Global brands now see Hong Kong worthy
of a flagship, where they are free of sales and import taxes, but have to
cough up the world’s highest—priced retail space: in 2013, its high–end
shopping malls rented for an average yearly $4,328 per square foot,
twice as high as New York’s Fifth Avenue, four times more than Paris’s or
London’s upscale retail districts.4

Hong Kong is also a city of skyscrapers. The city ranks the world’s
number one with 1,309 skyscrapers, almost twice as many as New
York City, its closest competitor.5 Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are a
representation of the world’s highest real estate prices, artificially kept
up by the government’s monopoly on land from which it derives a large
portion of its revenue, and pumped up by foreign real estate investors:
take a short stroll in central Hong Kong and touts will flog you with flyers
featuring for-sale apartments. Skyscrapers are the raison d’être behind
the city’s top two ranking tourist attractions: the Peak, a mountain on
Hong Kong Island that gives a panorama view over hundreds of concrete
high-rise towers, and the Symphony of Lights, the world’s largest
permanent lightshow that so deliriously animates the city’s most iconic
skyscrapers with pulsating lasers, under a soundtrack.

This concrete jungle of malls and skyscrapers has become the breeding
ground of a lucrative cross-fertilization. Malls are rarely found in
isolation. In the residential areas of the New Territories, they tend to
attach to residential towers and transit hubs; in Hong Kong Island and
Kowloon, they are known to reside under office and hotel towers.

It is a fruitful symbiosis. The broad mall, designed to seduce and bring

people in, prefers to sit on the ground where it maximizes its shop-
window façade like a Venus flytrap. Its tentacles reach deep into the
ground to attach to subway systems, or bind to other malls with an ivy-
like mesh of sky-bridges. The tall skyscraper, designed to move people
up, accommodates thousands efficiently but requires some distance: set
backs between other skyscrapers to allow for air and light. Together, the
mall provides the skyscrapers with extended entry points, an elevated
base, and a private roof deck, while the skyscrapers offer the mall an
icon visible from far away and a large economy of residents to feed
the mall, and establish a self-sufficient ecosystem. For these and other
reasons, the Big Box and the High Rise tend to mate.

The government has named the more recent permutations with a vague
and deceiving term: a “Comprehensive Development Area” (CDA). It
stands for a planning control mechanism that streamlined large mixed-
use Transit Oriented Developments (TOD), and helped the mall become
 3

more dominant. But this book coins this urban typology—defined by a

cluster of residential or office towers standing on a podium shopping
mall, often integrated with railway infrastructure—with a more honest
designator: a Mall-Oriented Complex (MOC), or “mall city.”

This new term recognizes the centrality of the mall and the vastness
of the complex. These mall-oriented developments are cities in and
of themselves; they accommodate captive audiences of up to tens of
thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure,
without ever having to leave. The mall is deliberately placed on the
intersection of all pedestrian flows, between all entry points into the
structure and the residential, office, and transit functions—impossible to
miss.

The mall city has become one of the basic units of urban development
in Hong Kong, like what the skyscraper has become of New York City. As
these insular developments multiplied, they connected to one another
and formed clusters, turning Hong Kong into an archipelago of mall
cities—with important implications for people’s lives.

The consequence of this urban form is that, for millions of people,

entering a mall has become an inevitability, not a choice. It has set in
stone a culture of consumerism in which everyday life is increasingly
played out on the terrain of the mall, and the private shopping atrium
takes on the role of the public square. And besides, Hong Kong’s
apartments are small, its summer climate hot and humid, so why not
meet at the mall where space is plenty and air-conditioning is free? And
while being there, although one might not need to shop for anything
specific, one might as well have a look around, and spend some money.6
In this respect, Hong Kong’s mall cities achieve the maximum potential
of the “Gruen Transfer.” This term refers to the moment when the mall’s
undulating corridors deviate consumers from their original intentions,
leading them to shop for shopping’s sake, rather than looking for a
product specifically. It was named in “honor” of architect Victor Gruen,
who designed the first mall, the 1956 Southdale Center in Minnesota—
fully enclosed and climate controlled, complete with anchor stores,
escalators, and interior atrium. Ironically, the Austrian immigrant, who
had changed his name from Grünbaum to Gruen (German for “green”),
had more idealistic purposes. He envisioned the mall as a new town
center—supplemented with apartments, offices, a park, and schools—as
a dense antidote to the rather solitary American suburbs. His invention
backfired when malls in America remained insular, and nourished the
frantic consumerism he was trying to reduce, like a Frankenstein’s
monster.

“Those bastard developments,”7 Gruen exclaimed as he revisited

his American creations. They had ditched community functions and
surrounded themselves not with other buildings, but with “the ugliness
and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking.”

But unlike their American counterparts, Hong Kong’s malls lie closer to
Gruen’s original intentions. They are part of a high-density, mixed-use
community. Even better than Gruen’s imagination, they are integrated
in mass transit and have stunning tall vertical atria—all the while being
highly profitable.
 5

Moreover, in Hong Kong Gruen’s creation would reach an entirely new

order of magnitude. The 1966 Ocean Terminal, the first in what was
called the “malling” of Hong Kong, planted the seed.8 Preceding mass
consumerism, it was built for tourists. Even if the locals did not shop at
Ocean Terminal, it acculturated them in window-shopping and brand
value. After China’s Open Door Policy in 1978 Hongkongers quickly
became consumers, their economy upgraded from manufacturing to
providing commercial and financial services to Mainland China.

Malls now catered to the growing middle class and were integrated into
new town developments, transit stations, and office complexes. They
quickly became the most visited malls in the world.

By the twenty-first century, with wealth skewing to a narrower segment

of the population, new malls abandoned the masses for luxury markets.
They grew from a couple of floors to 26-story structures, their height
an indicator of escalating retail rents. Moreover, mainland shoppers
now flood the city, many of them with same-day return tickets and
empty suitcases—in 2012, 35 million Chinese nationals visited Hong
Kong, 20 million of which returned the same day. With China expected
to overtake the United States as the world’s largest consumer economy
in 2016, the fate of Gruen’s invention will take another turn. Developers
in the Mainland and other places now closely copy Hong Kong’s mall
cities, aiming to achieve compact, transit-oriented, and lucrative
developments.
Mall City is an investigation of this interesting and influential urban
typology. The third in a book series about contemporary urban forms in
China, including Factory Towns of South China and Villages in the City, it
explores the city from a multidisciplinary and visual angle. Essays from
experts provide insight from different disciplines, including architecture,
urban planning, geography, cultural studies, and anthropology. They
offer explanations of how the mall city came into being, what it
means for Hong Kong communities, and what we can learn from this
development.

This book is also a catalog of Hong Kong’s mall cities, including a

structured list of key developments. In contrast to the other two
books, in which the case studies were sampled to explore the various
forms across different regions—laid out as guidebooks—the cases here
are sampled in such a way as to show how the type has evolved over
time. This historical typological classification of mall development in
Hong Kong not only provides structure for the book, it also shows how
shopping has become imbricated into the city’s politics and people’s
everyday lives.

The catalog begins with an early version: a single large residential block,
Chungking Mansions, which was converted into a mixed-use shopping
center with guesthouses and offices. The second category is the
residential estate with a podium, which revamped Corbusier’s “towers
in the park” into “towers on the mall.” The third includes office towers
on a podium mall, whereas type four, “T4,” is the most potent of them
all: it includes residential, hotels, and office towers into an ever more
encompassing complex, all the while the mall continues to be at the
nexus of the development. The evolution of this type shows a clear logic:
the mall city quickly grew in size and complexity, with an ever clearer
laser-sharp focus: getting people to shop.
 7

The layout of the book attempts to simulate the very urban experience
of this high-density and interconnected city it describes. Drawings,
pictures, and portraits help readers experience the bewildering,
intertwining, and congested city. Readers will encounter various
shoppers and shop-owners, like mainland Chinese close to the border,
wheeling home suitcases filled with toiletries and diapers. Or South
Asian and African traders at Chungking Mansions, buying cheap
cellphones and exchanging money. Or Filipino domestic workers at
World Wide House, remitting currency. These encounters reveal that
mall cities are not just homogenous. Within the microcosm of each mall
city appear different socio-economic groups, and products that remind
people of Hong Kong’s past reputation of good value, beyond its current
status as an Elysium of luxury handbags.

To help evaluate each mall city variation, urban design graduate

students from the University of Hong Kong made a series of drawings.
The exploded view is key. It shows the dynamic interrelations between
floors and circulation systems. To facilitate easy reading, different
uses are marked with different colors: blue stands for office, yellow for
residential, but you will find that red is the dominant color—the code for
shopping—always at the intersection of functions, impossible to avoid in
the maze of mall cities.

Shopping is seamless in Hong Kong. Metro exits lead directly into malls
and footbridges connect different malls so that pedestrians remain
in a shopping continuum, not contaminated by the public realm. The
drawings also visualize the interior mechanism of the complex, and
the important decisions developers need to make about program
composition, distribution, and circulation. How much retail makes a
development successful, and what should be the programmatic mix?
How should the program be distributed through the complex, and where
is the best location to place the “anchor” tenants? And most importantly:
how can circulation systems be placed in such a way as to “irrigate” the
mall with a solid stream of shoppers, nourishing retail rents from top to
bottom?
In this logistical equation, exterior architecture is a mere after-effect.
Overall architectural form is chiefly a result of maximizing Gross Floor
Area (GFA), at times simply by the literal extrusion of a plot. Ground–
level façade design is often an exercise of fortification, the deliberate
dismissal of urban context to introvert the mall, by maximizing the
“blank wall ratio”: the percentage of bare, windowless walls decorating
the ground floors. Residential towers typically have floorplans the shape
of a diamond or crucifix to cram in as many apartments as possible.
To further increase square footage developers squeeze bay windows
(excluded from the maximum gross area set by the government) onto
the buildings’ outer face, like putting pimples on a tower.

In opposition to the plain exterior and the small apartments stand

spacious and beautiful atria, the site of activities, special exhibitions,
and community gatherings, where many feel at “home.” These interior
spaces, as the cutaway drawings reveal, generate a unique type of
urbanisms, where shopping is juxtaposed with ice rinks, and corridors
and escalators transport people into a three dimensional spatial
universe. These lavish spaces stand in sharp contrast to, and are at times
at odds with, the sidewalks of the public realm.

The drawings also reveal the location of the Privately Owned Public
space (POPs), the few open spaces within the complex that are a
consequence of the government allowing developers to build more
floor space, if they provide open space to the public. In this ambiguity
between private management and public interests the POPs can be
found on places including rooftops, so that they are only accessible
through the maze of the mall. Meanwhile, at the POPs in front of the
 9

mall, the extensive use by the public is discouraged. For instance, Hong
Kong’s Times Square has deliberately provided uncomfortable chairs
for sitting, along with “over-zealous” guards preventing people from
lingering too long.9 Times Square is “open to use by public” but “subject
to rules on display,” including the outlawing of demonstrations, dogs,
birds, and musical instruments. In short, the trick is to place the POP to
get people to shop.

The essays in the book provide a deeper analysis of the mall city. For
instance, why did the mall city emerge in Hong Kong? In the first essay,
Barrie Shelton explains how Hong Kong is “predisposed towards mall
cities,” thanks to regional historic building typologies such as the Hakka
Village and the Guangdong shophouse, as well as local patterns of living,
including the custom of occupying roofs and the habit of multilevel
complexity stemming from contorting buildings to Hong Kong’s hillsides.

In the second essay, David Grahame Shane provides an international

background to Hong Kong’s mall complex. He traces the evolution of
Hong Kong’s retail malls from nineteenth-century European department
stores to 1970s Tokyo malls situated above railway junctions. In Hong
Kong, retail manifested itself in isolated towers and department stores
first, then as malls within new towns, and finally to central Hong
Kong’s three-dimensional meshwork of shopping corridors, footway
bridges, and subway connections. These recent developments are true
megastructures, cities in and of themselves, realizations of what 1960s
avant-garde architecture groups could only dream of, and a high-
density and transit-oriented urban form that is perhaps a model for
future cities.
Zooming into Hong Kong’s vertical malls, Tung-Yiu Stan Lai shows in the
third essay how they are increasingly rising upward, stacking up floors
of shopping as high as the Big Ben. But how do architects deal with the
challenge to bring shoppers to upper floors? Lai shows how particularly
designer Jon Jerde has succeeded in ensuring high retail rent values
throughout, thanks to a variety of innovations including very large glass
atria, a “spiral,” and “expresscalators.”

Nevertheless, as exciting as these developments may be architecturally,

they radically restructure the existing physical and social fabric of the
city. In the fourth essay, Carolyn Cartier shows how they become part of
a process of gentrification that drives up rents and introduces high-end
brands in industrial or working-class areas, while destroying historical
landscapes. Developers and government have converted waterfronts,
industrial areas, heritage areas, and working-class neighborhoods into
retail space. And as Hong Kong developers export their models to other
places including Shanghai and Beijing, mall city–style consumerism
quickly spreads.

Chungking Mansions is an odd exception to this gentrification. In

the fifth essay, Gordon Mathews writes about how this development
became a low-cost heaven of cheap guestrooms, meals, phones, and
computers. At the same time, with its unique South Asian and sub-
Saharan African clientele, he argues it is “probably the most globalized
building in the world.” Mathews finds clues to the building’s peculiarity
in its unique history, including its large South Asian population and lack
of a unified ownership structure.

In the sixth essay, Cecilia L. Chu challenges the conceptualization of

malls as solely a commercialized space eroding the traditional spheres
of community. Focusing on New Town Plaza, Chu shows how community
development is key to the mega malls of the early 1980s, as developers
provided locals with billiards, bowling arenas, ice skating rinks, and
fountains. To many residents of new towns, the mall became more than
just a capitalist space for making profits, but a place they attached
 11

sentiment and meaning to, on their own terms. Ironically, as the mega
malls that used to be places of mass consumption strive to be more
exclusive today, they formed the basis for resistance to development,
since local community groups protest against further changes.

Jonathan D. Solomon, in the seventh essay, questions the notion

that Hong Kong’s malls are anti-urban by default, like many Western
examples. Not all developments fulfill the stereotype of the “glo-cal
bypass,” like Union Square, which links directly to the airport but has
little local connections. The International Finance Centre (IFC), on the
other hand, is an example of a “global village,” more integrated globally
and locally, the crossroads between the airport, railway, ferry, and
local neighborhood—partly because of a unique set of footbridges. In
his intricate drawings of the networks, IFC stands at the intersection
of a new type of public urban space network of shopping centers and
footbridges that have the potential to create new class encounters, like
Baudelaire once observed on Parisian boulevards.

In short, the mall has the dual potential to either erode urban public life
or to contribute to it. At times it fragments the city with monotonous
development, at other times it hyper-connects the urban fabric and
enthralls it with diversity.

At worst, Hong Kong’s mall cities represent a dystopian future of a

city after the “Shopapocalypse.”10 They are the built structures of a
state-of-the-art post-Fordist society in which people prefer to be in
the mall as often as possible, not only to quench their shopping thirst
but also to breathe in fresh air. According to a research conducted
by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010, the indoor levels of
particulate matters of Hong Kong’s malls were 70 percent lower than
outdoor, thanks to their large ventilation systems. Malls offer consumers
an oasis away from the smog, a place where they are not confronted
with the undesired side effects of their consumerism: the nitrate-
saturated air from neighboring South China factories.
The fundamental structure of a hypermodern society appears to be a
medieval form of urbanism in which private enclaves stand as fortresses
in the landscape, fragmenting the city in a series of high-rise gated
communities, only accessible from shop-flanked gateways. Streets
outside the enclave suffer, faced by the blank walls of introverted
buildings, at best masked by architectural make-up. Devoid of life,
streets are demoted to a place where people come to stand in line to
get into the luxury shops—Canton Road has permanent queues into Louis
Vuitton—as an affirmation of true brand veneration.11

At best, Hong Kong’s mall cities are vibrant, diverse, and interconnected
developments contributing to the public realm. Solid podium malls
are broken into pieces that integrate with the city fabric, intersected
by open streets and courtyards that increase and improve public open
space in the city. They enable natural air ventilation, let in landscape
and vegetation to naturally cool down the buildings and lessen heat
island effects. The podium roofs are interconnected with footbridges so
that residents enjoy the elevated level continuously. Podium edges are
not blank walls but shop fronts that activate the street, or the podium
lies underground as a base for open space. Finally, breaking the mall
can occur on the level of a shop, by providing opportunities not just for
formulaic flagships of global retailers, but for everyday shop owners
that add to a diversity of products, for instance, in Argyle Centre’s small
stores, or in the tiny “cube boxes” in Sino Centre that anyone can rent for
a little over a hundred dollars a month, with “no commission.”

The time is right for Hong Kong’s mall cities to reinvent themselves.
Mainland shoppers might lose their appetite for Hong Kong’s malls
soon since they can find similar products and experiences at home: in
2012, three Chinese cities constructed the largest amount of new retail
space in the world, and the city of Tianjin had more retail space under
construction than the existing shopping space of any European city
 13

(except for Paris and Moscow).12 Macao, by 2018, will have shopping
space more than 15 times compared to a decade ago.13 Will this fast-
developing retail sector in Mainland China and in Macao’s casinos make
Hong Kong’s shopping malls unnecessary?

Meanwhile, in the United States, the birthplace of the mall, there are
many sightings of “dead malls.” There, observers herald the end of
the mall,14 victims of high vacancy rates, “ghostboxes” (empty anchor
stores), and “label scars” (still existing signage of a previous tenant).
Retail increasingly leaves the mall to return to cities, streets, and
markets. Yet, Hong Kong still builds more malls, while it eliminates its
markets and streets.

During the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s 2014 protest for universal
suffrage, students occupied neither the quasi-public spaces on top
of malls, nor the interior atriums, but the little of what is left of Hong
Kong’s public space on the ground. They placed their tents smack in
front of the malls, on top of highways. Their recuperation of public urban
space expressed the street’s democratic importance. Good urban space,
and its capacity for inclusiveness, difference, spontaneity, as well as for
contestation, is vital to any city—like the Ancient Greek “agoras” were
places to buy goods and discuss politics, and became the birthplace of
democracy.

In addition, public space appears attractive to retail as well, as shown by

the shopping trends that offer alternatives to enclosed malls. Beijing’s
new Taikoo Li Sanlitun is a thriving retail district with shop-lined streets.
Hong Kong’s popular Star Street features local artisan shops mixed with
restaurants. While these streetscape environments are arguably equally
retail-centric as malls, they nevertheless benefit from the identity,
diversity, and spontaneity of the streets.
Since the Hong Kong government owns most of the land, in contrast to
most other places, it can actually exert its influence and break up the
mall with the possibility of creating new exciting types of urbanism. This
does not mean it needs to abandon the mall city altogether, but to swing
the balance more in favor of the public realm. It needs to supplement
the mall with a dose of public open space, just like it has used escalators,
an export from the mall, to inject flavor into the city—for instance, the
Central–Mid-Levels escalator, the world’s largest outdoor covered
escalator, which led to the vibrant “Soho” district, and now plays a major
role in Hong Kong’s cultural identity.

Whatever the future holds, this book features contemporary Hong Kong
as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space
has come a long way since the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades—
according to Walter Benjamin, the birthplace of capitalist spectacle,
where for the first time luxury goods had been put on secular display.
It has morphed from the Ur-form of the arcades to the department
stores,15 and from the mall into the mall city: fully intertwined into
people’s everyday lives. Hong Kong’s mall cities represent a new
moment in the phantasmagoria of commodities, in which shopping
is ubiquitous and mall atria are ever more mesmerizing, aiming to
perpetuate a constant consciousness of shopping. If Paris was the
paradigmatic consumer city of the nineteenth century, then Hong Kong
is the consumer capital of the twenty-first century: a high-density
“dreamworld” of mall cities.
 15

NOTES
1 Data of leasable retail area per country taken from the International Council of Shopping Centers.

2 “City-state” is a politically contentious term in Hong Kong, which has become a Special Administrative
Region within the People’s Republic of China since 1997.

3 PwC, PwC’s Cities of Opportunity: Through a Retail and Consumer Lens (December 2012), 13.

4 CBRE Research, Hong Kong Prime Retail: Marketview, Q1, 2013.

5 Emporis, “Most Skyscrapers,” at http://www.emporis.com/statistics/most-kyscrapers (accessed June

14, 2013). Emporis defines a skyscraper as a multistory building at least 100 meters tall.

6 Researchers found that spending is directly related to the amount of time people spend at shopping
centers. See Jon Goss, “The ‘Magic of the Mall’: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the
Contemporary Retail Built Environment,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83.1 (1993),
18–47.

7 Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 216.

8 Tai-lok Lui, “The malling of Hong Kong,” in Gordon Mathews and Tai-lok Lui (eds.), Consuming Hong
Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001), 25.

9 Diana Lee, “Pushy Times Square Guards Raise Hackles,” The Standard, March 5, 2008.

10 The term “Shopapocalypse” was coined by Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, a
secular anti-consumerist performance group.

11 Katie Hunt, “Chinese Luxury Labels to Challenge Western Counterparts,” BBC News, December 14,
2011.

12 CBRE Global Viewpoint, “Shopping Centre Development: The Most Active Global Cities,” June 2012.

13 Muhammad Cohen, “Amid Casino Woes, Macau Retail Shines, At Least For Las Vegas Sands,” Forbes,
August 12, 2014.

14 For instance, Tony Dokoupil, “Is the Mall Dead?” Newsweek, November 11, 2008; Ellen Dunham-Jones
and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (New
York: Wiley, 2008).

15 The development of retail in Hong Kong and other Asian cities has also been influenced by the
advent of the department store in the early twentieth century. See Kerrie MacPherson (ed.), Asian
Department Stores (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998).
In a hyper-dense city such as Hong Kong, developers
prefer to maximize the amount of floor space that can be
developed on any given site. Hong Kong’s resulting mall
design typology is vertically stacked retail, with some
malls containing the same amount of floors as a mid-
rise building. Of the malls featured here, only Chungking
Mansions relies on elevators as the primary method of
vertical transport, resulting in lengthy queues to use
the building’s few elevators. The vast majority of Hong
Kong’s malls have an intricate network of escalators
aimed at maximizing the number of visitors to pass by
the maximum amount of storefronts. Many of these
malls place upward and downward escalators parallel to
one another (e.g., Golden Shopping Centre, Tuen Mun
Town Plaza), while others invert the escalators, allowing
minimal effort for swift passage between multiple floors
(e.g., Lok Fu Plaza, Sino Centre). More adventurous
vertical transport involves escalators spanning multiple
floors, accenting the grandeur of the structure itself:
the escalators of Times Square span multiple floors,
ascending the atrium in a crisscross shape, while the
primary escalator of Langham Place is impressively tall
and time-consuming, allowing passengers to take in
their surroundings at a leisurely pace. While attractive
and interesting visual elements in their own right, these
unique escalator configurations additionally serve the
purpose of spreading people around as efficiently and as
evenly as possible.
 CATALOG 123

VERTI CAL
TR ANS PO RT
 cityplaza

elements chungking mansions

megabox

golden shopping centre harbour city K11

langham place lok fu plaza

mei foo sun CHuen world-wide house

 CATALOG 125

vertica l tr a nsport
new town plaza

pacific place

park central sino centre

the landmark

times square

tuen mun town plaza

 type

2
Mall /
Residential

A Mall for Public Housing Residents

LO K F U PLAZA
L
ok Fu Plaza, called Lok Fu shopping center in Wang Tau first real estate investment
Centre when it first opened Hom / Lok Fu together with the trust, and today Asia’s largest.
in 1985, was constructed construction of a MTR station. As a consequence, the estate
and managed by the Hong The Housing Authority chose to changed from public to private
Kong Housing Authority. build Lok Fu Centre on top of the ownership. In 2007, Link started
Before the development of MTR Lok Fu Station. a renovation program that would
Lok Fu Centre, no commercial cover every corner of Lok Fu
facilities had been planned for After only two years, the Plaza with shops.
the resettlement estates of Lok Housing Authority decided to
Fu. Shops and workshops were expand Lok Fu Centre’s mall

wan tau hom east road

wan tau hom central road
only provided later in ground with a wider variety of shops,
floor bays because of concern no longer perceiving Lok Fu’s
over the lack of employment public housing residents as
opportunities for tenants. Until poor working-class households,
then, on-street hawking was but rather as shoppers with
wan tau hom south road
common in many Kowloon purchasing power. junction
central estates.
The Housing Authority
ro phase 1 / zone a
In 1975, a Town Planning eventually sold Lok Fu Centre a
d
Office study recommended to the private Link Real Estate
the establishment of a district Investment Trust, Hong Kong’s phase 2 / zone b

Wang Shun
House
Phase II /
zone b

Bus
Terminal
Wang Tat
House Wang Yat
Podium House

Wang Hong
House

Phase I /
zone a Podium
 CASE STUDIES / TYPE 2 159

R
Residential

Residential 48%
Retail 37% Phase II / zone b
Eateries 15%
Phase I / zone a
3/F

uny

2/F
uny foodsquare
uny
Wang Yat House Apartment supermarket

Flats per floor: 20–26

Flat size: 35–80 m2 1/F
Flat cost: 1.75–8.0 million HKD
Cost per m2: 50,000–100,000 HKD
foo lam
Address palace
198 Junction Road, Wang Tau A
Hom, Kowloon
uG2/F B
Developer
The Hong Kong Housing
Authority (Before)
The Link Property Limited
mcdonald’s
(Now) uG1/F
Architect
Rocco Design
Construction G/F

Initiation: 1989
Renovation Completion: 2011
Site Area
300,000 m2
Gross Floor Area / GFA
1,160,800 m2
Floor Area Ratio / FAR
3.9
Building Height
+20.5 m / 25 m (Podium/
Tower)
Blank Wall at Ground Level
30%
A
To facilitate promotional
activities, the atrium of Lok Fu
Plaza’s second phase mall is A B
more spacious.

B
The public podium is available
to residents, but also attracts
other people into the complex.

C
The wide circulation paths
around the oval atrium
facilitate pedestrian flows and
allow for the placement of C
different commercial kiosks.
Hong Kong’s Big Box with a Ball and type
Beehive Atrium
3
M E GAB OX Mall /
Office

M
egaBox is located at the
center of the rapidly
growing East Kowloon
district, which the government
plans to develop into a new
Central Business District.
MegaBox is the only project
within the area that contains
major retail, entertainment, as
well as two office towers called
Enterprise Square 5.

Designed by the Jerde

Partnership, the MegaBox
redefines Big Box retail in a high-
density city. Big Box retail such
as IKEA and Toys’R’Us, along with
restaurants and entertainment,
has been stacked in a 19-story
mall. MegaBox is divided into
four thematic areas for different
demographics: fashion zone,
home improvement zone,
electrical products, and an
entertainment and restaurant
zone called EATertainment,
which includes an IMAX theater,
and an indoor ice rink that
looks out to the city through a
Enterprise Enterprise 30-meter-tall curtain wall.
Square Square
Tower 1 Tower 2 A system called Totally
Connected Modules (TCM)
attempts to ease vertical people
flows within the tall structure.
Pedestrians are moved quickly
between zones through express
escalators that cut across
Megabox multiple stories. Private cars can
go all the way to the top zone
with only three loops.

Unlike other large commercial

developments in Hong Kong,
MegaBox is not connected to
Hong Kong’s metro station, but
offers a free shuttle bus service
to the nearest MTR station.
 CASE STUDIES / TYPE 3 195

BEEHIVE ATRIUM /
MEGA ICE

Address
38 Wang Chiu Road
Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong
Developer
Kerry Properties
Architect
The Jerde Partnership
Construction
Initiation: 2005
Completion: 2007
Construction Cost
2 billion HKD
Site Area
12,000 m2
Gross Floor Area / GFA
150,000 m2
Floor Area Ratio / FAR
12.5
Building Height
+76 m / 113 m (Podium / Tower)
Blank Wall at Ground Level
58%
 A
MegaBox’s “Ball Atrium” breaks
the big box with a six-story-
tall glass facade that lets in
sunlight and gives visitors a
view of Kowloon.

B
Deep red colors, bright lights,
reflective surfaces, and
electronic messages augment
the mesmerizing maze of
escalators. Separately themed
areas add to the vertical retail
experience.

Visitors—Johnny Lee (age 38)

and Alan Lee (age 6)

I came to MegaBox to spend

quality time with my son on
a Sunday afternoon. There
are few places in Hong Kong
where both my son and I can
be entertained at the same
time without much worrying.
We both are frequent visitors
of MegaBox. My son finds
the interior full of colors, so
much colors that it sometimes
makes him “dizzy,” and there
are many fun activities and
adventures. I asked him why
he likes MegaBox and he
replied, “Many cool lights and
cool cartoon characters! Many
things to play and the furniture
is my size!” (the children levels
feature life-size cartoon figures
and children’s furniture).

I am happy that my son is

excited and the surrounding
environment arouses his
imagination. It is rare in Hong
Kong to find a place with so
many activities, including ice-
skating, an Imax theater, and
a video game arcade, without
being too crowded. I also
appreciate that MegaBox has
an IKEA and Suning electrical
B store where I can check up on
the latest products while my
son is happily occupied.
 CASE STUDIES / TYPE 3 197

Enterprise Square Enterprise

Tower 1 Square
Tower 2

M
36/F

The Mall
Retail 45%
Office 35%
Eateries 10%
Entertainment 10%

O
20/F

Office

BEEHIVE ATRIUM

11/F

Leo Paper Products Ltd., 36th

MEGA ICE Floor
10/F Office size: 615 m2
9/F Office cost per month: 198,645
8/F COCO CURRY HKD
7/F
6/F Windows per floor area: 25%
5/F A Operable windows: 12%
4/F IKEA
3/F BALL ATRIUM Enterprise Square 5 Tower 1
2/F Offices per floor: 3
1/F Office size: 550 m2
AEON
Office cost per m2: 350 HKD

Enterprise Square 5 Tower 1

is one of two towers located
within MegaBox. Floor-to-
ceiling sized windows allow
maximum sunlight penetration
B as well as a view of East
QUICKSILVER Kowloon Harbour on the north.
Floors are divided into one to
H&M six office spaces, depending on
G/F the tenants.
CREDITS

Cover Design
Anthony Lam

Layout Design
Anthony Lam

Graphic Editing
Anthony Lam

Infographics
Footprints; Cross-sections; 312 Malls in Hong Kong; F.A.R. (Floor Area Ratio);
Blank Wall Ratio: Anthony Lam
17 Mall City Case Studies: Chi Fung Chan, Marty Chun Kit Chan

Case Studies
Chungking Mansions: Bibiana Gomez Dangond
Golden Shopping Centre: Dong Lu
Tuen Mun Town Plaza: Li Yapeng
Lok Fu Plaza: He Yuan
Citywalk: Camille Anne Ang Tang
Sino Centre: Chi Fung Chan
Argyle Centre: Sun Cong
The Landmark: Wang Lin
Shun Tak Centre: Li Li
Times Square: Loc Hoi Tran
MegaBox: Marco Ng
Harbour City: Wang Xiachen
Cityplaza: Tara McGready
Pacific Place: Audrey Ma
IFC: Ye Xinxin
Langham Place: Wu Yue
Elements: Marty Chun Kit Chan