ABSTRACT
Of the many substantive arguments for existing cities to be densified, and for entirely new cities to be built with sufficient density, the belief in optimized infrastructure and the responsibility to minimize energy use and the consumption of resources reigns seemingly paramount. The assumption that dense urbanity reduces the environmental impact of cities has become widely accepted. Interestingly, the nascent discourses of the Smart City also lapse into preaching the mantras of efficiency and sustainability, along with comfort, safety and security. Although these intentions are indeed undismissable, this chapter eschews a definition of sustainability on these terms, but rather takes the view of high-density urbanism as a beneficial model for a multitude of design ambitions. The narrative of Hong Kong’s density is told through four short stories, each narrating a paradigm of the city: parametric; adaptive; customized; and smart. In this chapter, Hong Kong is read and articulated as having had intelligence to harness, regulate and manage its complexity; to have plasticity to anticipate an adaptive, not prescriptive future; and to generate the DNA to yield a specific and distinctive identity to its urbanism. In the political context in which ‘greenwashing’ pervades much of the discourse on sustainability, the paradigms of Parametric Urbanism, the Adaptive City and the Customized City, and their associations, will be explored through the case of Hong Kong, and its ruthless mercantilism, its disruptive and violent evolutionary transformations, and its highly identifiable yet a ruthlessly monotonous spatial character. The notion of urban smartness as attenuated efficiency and augmented cybernetic control are challenged. As the discourses of the smart city migrate towards maturity, a series of taxonomies serve as devices with this to take stock of the discursive shifts in the theorization of the contemporary city. In this light, the repercussions of information and communication technologies (ICT) have immense potential to augment the intelligence of cities, yet this chapter queries the potential for design, fabrication and production technologies to embed urban intelligence into the physicality of cities. The fundamental questions to be asked is how smart is Hong Kong’s brand of density and compactness?
