With the influx of people living and working in the city creates strain in its infrastructure. Many questions arise like what to do with the rubbish? Is there enough room to live? How do we alleviate traffic in the streets? With buildings getting smarter, how does technology affect the way we live? Is technology changing the way we experience shopping and entertainment?
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​Hessam Kazemzadeh – Continuum from San Francisco, USA. Formally a Design Engineer at SOM, Hessam is a visionary and innovative practitioner, he works at the intersection of innovation, technology and construction. He has been in the forefront of advancing economical and innovative solutions for building industry. His diverse portfolio features complex building typologies, novel engineering systems and collaborations with distinguished architects and art studios.

​Rob Garrett – Black Sheep Restaurants is a creative hailing from Durban, South Africa, with a background in interior and furniture design. With a sincere passion for all things visual, Rob considers himself a magpie of sorts; collecting things of interest and piecing them together to form cohesive design narratives. As Head of Design at Black Sheep Restaurants, Rob works with a team of interior designers, architects, graphic designers, fashion designers, photographers, videographers and chefs to convey thought-provoking stories through the interiors, branding, and atmosphere of many of Hong Kong’s best restaurants.

​Anil Mistry – Experiential Design Director from United Kingdom has spanned the worlds of Fashion, Art, TV, Design, Comedy, advertising, digital interaction and photography. He has previously held creative director positions with Paramount Pictures and The Walt Disney Company, and since 2013 he has focused on a career as an experiential creative director and consultant. His work sits at the intersection point between design, technology, entertainment, spatial design and human behavior, which he combines to create ideas that change the way people feel, think and behave. He now develops experiential campaigns and concepts for some of the world’s best-known brands – Including IBM, Nike, Canon, Estee Lauder, Apple, Bacardi and Sony

​David Buffonge – Lead8 was raise in the Caribbean and studied in the United Kingdom is an award-winning architect and urban designer with over 20 years of experience in international architecture and urban design. His passion for shaping the built environment and awareness of the contextual influences of a location has contributed to his involvement in the design of many prominent buildings throughout Asia.

​Wai Tang – QUAD studio was born in Hong Kong in 1970 and moved to the United Kingdom in 1972.  In 1989, Wai Tang studied at the Birmingham School of Architecture before moving to London in 1993 to attend MA/PG Dip at the University of Westminster where he was mentored by David Greene of Archigram and received the RIBA Silver Medal Runner Up award for best national diploma project in 1995. He believes that creative world is evolving where designers are becoming more of a polymath. Designers are not one person doing many things rather we are many people focused on one thing resulting to an enriched design solution to our clients.

HarbourLoop a vision to transform the Hong Kong waterfront into an iconic 23 kilometre urban cycle, running and walking network. HarbourLoop will be Hong Kong’s first mobility network prioritising zero emission modes of transit, connecting Hong Kong to Kowloon in a continuous loop. The route exploits the legacy of the city’s world-famous Victoria Harbour.
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​Buffonge believes that there is a pressing need to invest in more people-focused multimodal networks to complement and connect Hong Kong, and promote a healthy and active means of moving around. HarbourLoop applies lateral thinking, Hong Kong’s home-grown design and engineering expertise, and an investment in public realm and transport technology that could lead to the creation of an efficient, flexible and world-class network – a first for Hong Kong.

​Alleviating traffic
To reduce the traffic on the streets, we can increasing different modes of transportation using a combination of mass transit modes like Intercity Rail, Metro and Automated public transport. In a more personal level, if we can devise a system where all vehicles are 100% automated and shared by all, there will not be a need to own a car or even a carpark? We can also alleviate logistic traffic from the roads by diversifying how parcels are delivered either by automated drones or by creating dedicated tunnels below ground for logistic delivery.

Gasifying your waste
One thing that a highly populated city creates is waste. I have mentioned this in my previous journals that Hong Kong landfill will be topping out by 2020 and by 2030 China will create 2X more waste that the US. There are many ideas to counteract this problem but one thing that is worth looking at is gasification. What if we can utilize waste to fuel our cities? Apart from glass and metal, all waste can be gasified to 5% of it’s original mass. For this to work, all building will need to be fitted with a waste

​The new reality
Recently, I have a number of email exchanges with David Greene of Archigram made me aware of the tech evolution; The Fax was invented in 1926, the Telex in 1933 then it took 60 years before the introduction of SMS. Then in the turn of the century, in just over 10 years we had Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, each extending the boundaries of that way we communicate today. The point is, we can only speculate how the future might be with the technology we have today and there might be some invention tomorrow that can change the way we live our future.

“If I grow old and alone, I will rather spend my dyeing days with my close friends and have a good time together” said Anil which is true in some degree and it is a good model for the concept of co-living
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​From Co-working to Co-living?
In a densely populated city, we have to look at way to accommodate more people. One way is to share our working and living spaces. There are many very successful co-working spaces in the modern city. I have been working on an open office for over 15 years and I believe that co-working spaces are quite easy space to adapt to. But in regards to co-living, it is more complex. Most of the time after a hard day’s work, you would like to seek a bit of privacy, some down time for yourself. For co-living to work, the line between public and private needs to be carefully defined so that there is a balance between the two. What spaces can be shared, what spaces are private and what spaces are in between. Personally, unless there is a breakthrough in the way we live, I believe that co-living spaces work better for either people who are single and starting out in a city or the elderly who are alone and prefers company rather than those with a family.

Picking David up in the Hotel, we stopped at the traffic lights on our way to Kowloon.
“The density (of Hong Kong) is amazing, not every day you see an elevated highway adjacent to densely packed residential dwellings” said David as we sat inside my car looking up at the flyover above us. Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated place in the world (after its neighbor, Macau, Singapore and Monaco)

​If one looks at Central from above, you will be amazed on the sheer density of the city. Every plot of land has been maxed out and extruded up. As the lights turned green, David had another observation, “Architects can here draw a single plan and extrude as high as they can!” He didn’t speculate any further, but I think that he try to imply that there is no attempt by the architect to design a façade and it was a manifestation based on pure functionality. It is form follows function taken to its very extreme.

​Upon arrival on the top floor of No.1 Peking Road, we were greeted at the reception. Our table wasn’t ready so we went to the bar for a drink. As we entered the mezzanine level, there was a dramatic panoramic view of the Hong Kong skyline to the south and a much calmer view of the city of Kowloon to the north. David was worried about jetlag so he decided to stick with local beer. David had problems differentiating the light coming from the adjacent buildings and reflections from the restaurants. “The beauty of LED! In the 60’s, we had to rely on neon to create this effect” hence, technology changes a city. In the 60’s and 70’s the city was lit by neon bill boards cantilevering over the streets. Although these billboards still exist, their existence are diminishing because of the introduction of LED advertisement. LED has the ability to be seen from afar to the point where whole Hong Kong harbor is lined with LED façade lighting as well as advertisement.

​In my final thesis, David inspired me with an idea of “a building that constantly rebuilds itself” that was very befitting to Hong Kong at that time. It was a response to the nature of the Island where the constant land reclamation was thought to be a norm. The idea was before the Central Government Offices at Tamar and the urban reclamation zone at Admiralty and Central. The argument was that buildings were built and then taken down within a decade due to the rising land prices. What if we made it easier to rebuild?  What kind of architecture will result? A metaphorical solution was to create a floating infrastructure that can expand into the seas where one could freely “plug in” buildings from time to time.

​Later that semester, David introduced me to Cedric Price at our Post Graduate Diploma show. Cedric had one look at my diploma thesis and said it reminded him of his “Fun Palace” he did in 1964. Cedric asked me to get in touch with him and he could enlighten me on his ideas approach in the design of the “Fun Palace” and the “Pottery Think Belt”. He wrote me a letter to help me on my research paper which later I submitted for the President’s Medal. Cedric asked me to send him my final research paper when it was done, but I regretfully never got around to it and sadly he died in 2003. My thesis won the Runner Up to 1995 RIBA silver medal for the Best Post Graduate Diploma Project in the UK.