Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong (review)

All too often, maps in urban guidebooks focus on flat interpretations of the cityscape, in which topography is lost and verticality ignored. But Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook is not a guidebook in the traditional sense but, rather, a manifesto that reconceptualizes the notion of “ground” in contemporary urbanism as a surface across which daily activities and vast circulatory networks occur. Hong Kong provides the perfect backdrop for such a reading, as a vertical city of skyscrapers, huddled between steep mountains and reclaimed foreshores, where “ground” makes no sense physically or culturally.

The authors delicately combine topological maps, photographs, and text, held together by the common purpose of trying to make sense of Hong Kong’s design and urban form. The authors have an architectural background, and although the book is cartographic in form, its maps are highly experimental, a guide to the everyday rhythms and materialities of a Hong Kong real and imagined, its past, present, and future.

Cities Without Ground is organized thematically into six chapters. “Ground” discusses the verticality, the networks of multi-level pedestrian footbridges, and the surrounding mountains that characterize Hong Kong. “Solids” explores how the built urban form behaves as a casing, “a continuous, urban-scaled interior” (p. 17) within which the city’s circulatory network operates, and “Connectivity” examines the interchange between various multi-level systems of transport. “Activity,” the only non-cartographic section, addresses the occupation of space, portrayed through a series of photographs; and “Atmosphere” offers a series of temperature maps between humid outdoors and air-conditioned shopping malls, a central part of any Southeast Asian experience.

The “Guidebook” itself appears between the two final chapters, and consists of 32 double-page colour maps depicting different parts of Hong Kong. The maps address the themes, giving an unusually visual sense of fluidity. Three-dimensionality is crucial: the authors present a stylized bird’s-eye view of the city, in which roads are absent and overpasses transparent, marked by a procession of floating vehicles, and the usual preoccupation with the built form is purposefully ignored. Building walls are treated like the roads, and paths are colour-coded to distinguish between publicly and privately accessible spaces without interrupting flow. Connections between levels – elevator shafts, escalators, stairways, and moving walkways – are also included. Construction machinery and typical transport are carefully delineated – from hot-air balloons to backhoes and trams – as are sounds and smells. Local activity is noted: “Housewives haggle over preserved sausages” (p. 36); “Louis Vuitton” and “Fake Louis Vuitton” (p. 41); “English tutor with bad grammar” (p. 67). All these elements give a sense of complexity and contradiction in what is, perhaps, an inherently paradoxical city.

Some maps also sit between real and imagined – one proposes a spiralling, not-yet-existent shopping centre atop Central Market, complete with indoor swimming pools and ski slopes. This is reminiscent of a typically Hong Kongese approach: pyscho-geographic films like Chungking Express (Wong 1994) and books like HK Lab (Gutierrez, Portefaix, and Manzini 2002) and Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (Dung and others 2012) have already addressed the relationship between maps, visuality, experience, memory, and urban imaginaries in the city. However, rather than detracting from the significance of Cities Without Ground, the use of the imagined in these maps is fortified by a body of highly experimental works that seek a different understanding of Asian post-colonial urbanism.

The written text, however, too often falls into the jargon of architects and designers, without establishing terms of reference – so much so that it often come across as superficial or superfluous, and suggests that the authors themselves are unable to express the complexity inherent in their maps. But for readers of Cartographica, it is the maps that will speak most proudly – both as the results of an impressive body of empirical research and by seamlessly presenting...