Thoughts on Comparing New York and Hong Kong

Well, thinking comparatively about cities only seems to be easy or straightforward. Any professed form of application of theory might just as well involve a form of mash-up between literary narrative and urban imagery. Theory no more than a narrative may be in for a form of a confrontation with its own ephemeral materiality as a written text bound to its media, audiences and circulations, which brings it close to how cities are experienced, lived and told. In this regard, any changes to structures of relations that define cities could be compared to their re-writings. Re-branding, apart from being parts of urban marketing campaigns, are also re-writings of how ciites are read by their everyday life participants. Rewiring cities, through new architectural ventures, infrastructure upgrades, and event economy may be only a partial determinant in how cities are actually told and retold in the circuits of information production and exchange. One might think of literary works that before being considered universally, or not so universally, great were lounging in obscurity of their before-their-times originality for, probably precisely, the lack of accepted forms of being read in terms that would define their much later reception. This may be behind why urban popularity has an exhaustion arc that every urban enthusiasm follows from its highs to its untarrying lows as what is described as public interest in the latest urban toy - be it a spectacular museum, a posh train terminal or a heritage quarter - wanes.

It could be interesting to find out whether the more internationally recognized urban icons, such as Paris' Eiffel Tower, have a yearly marketing budget behind their seemingly inexhaustible pull power on the touristy throngs that do not tire of climbing up it. The research question, of course, is whether what makes it different from Coca-Cola, whose unfading brand is propped up by serious annual spending on keeping its brand on everybody's lips and minds, is an urban narrative it is inseparable from and indispensable to. In other words, this Eiffel Tower question has relevance to efforts elsewhere not only to create an attractive urban environment, and not necessarily by literally copying le tour Eiffel into some outlying, postmodernly ahistorical location, by seeking ways in which an urban text could be effectively narrated with the help of interventions into urban space. Everybody cites the economic reasons behind Berlin's come-back as the creative capital of the early 21st century, such as artists attracting low rents and transportation accessibility to major art markets, making it thus into an export processing zone of high and low culture of sorts. However what is missing is a sense in which its urban space may be part of a comprehensive effort to narrative Berlin's urban identity anew with how its transformation over the last twenty years was steered.

The closesty one might be getting to the scale of the urban transformation Berlin was going through since its re-unification should be what is going on in Chinese cities where old cities are rebuilt in a seemingly endless process of creative destruction of the old urban spaces and erecting in their place as endless anfilade of new ones, where new cities spring up by the dozen in places and spaces only recently on the very margins of global field of attention, and where the transformations in terms of how these cities are experienced and narrated are yet to find their sufficiently verbalized predictions or realizations. For comaparison with Berlin I presume Hong Kong would have a fitting combination of change and continuity, of the old and the new, that would let a sense of comparative learning from a pair of examples of urban transformations about how urban narratives in discourse and space get formed, reformed and represented. Is it about urban aesthetics, urban modernity, or urban culture? I am not sure if it is any of the above or all of them. One could argue against urban modernism and avant-garde on the basis of their lacking appear to the masses that ultimate make or break a city's fortunes. It's is difficult to argue that New York's MoMA's renovation, opened to the public to the tune of a billion large price tag, has made much of a difference of how New Yorks international image was narrated and experienced ever since. How many films have actually taken it into a focus? How many works of literature have made a reference to its high-brow modernist recast? How much of an impact its forms have had on the architectural or urbanist discourse? One might still be looking for an NY MoMA phenomenon as far as urban change and identity are concerned.

It may be that only thinking about Hong Kong that a sense of newness of New York and America's rise to the position in the international scene it enjoys now sinks in. Without going to Wikipedia entries on the two cities just yet, it does seem plausible that Hong Kong would show more historical depth, continuity, and weight than New York does. After all, there are few of the historical snapshot moments that decorate New York's history - the one dollar purchase, initial christening as New Amsterdam, rapid spread amid pre- and later intensely industrial wasteland - that may be as easily applicable to Hong Kong as an urban text. One can surely argue about the post-European legacy, British colonization, and common modern foundations of the two metropolises. However, The historical background and the sense that for New York what would be a common denominator is the whole story whereas for Hong Kong there are layered grounds of historical comparison that are yet to be properly decifered and read might contribute to a sense that a different historical and contemporary dynamics may be at work in the two cities. That should all the more so apply when their brand identities, so to say, may be sought to be compared to each other. The question is not just whether Hong Kong might want to become the New York of East Asia, since one might justly question what if it would have to re-think itself from probably an unsustainable model for imitation or emulation, however one wants to call the process of learning from other cities' success or stories of it.

The question is more along the likes of whether cities have their unique stories to tell and whether there are meaningful ways to compare between them.