With the cities around the world expanding and population growing rapidly, and some even evolve into “megacities”. Cities are as congested as ever. Roads and pedestrian pathways are crowded with vehicles and people which requires solution from the built environment professionals. Elevated and underground pathways are solutions that designer and urban planner came up with in the late 20th century. Different cities came up with different style of these pathways but Hong Kong has a very unique mega -structure of elevated walkways. They create a whole extra street-level, like a “double-decker street” which are fascinating even for me, who travel around the Central-Midlevel escalators regularly. The escalators has also obviously gained attention from movies directors for example in The Batman film: The Dark Knight and also Chungking Express. The simultaneous movement and the insider emotion of the people through the bustling street are captured by directors.
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Good attempt to use your own personal experience in the interpretation of the text. However, I would not use “megastructure” to describe the elevated walkway system in Hong Kong since megastructure implies multiple programmes in one repetitive system and it is slightly different from how Yoos and James thinks of the system as a product of “on-demand planning”. As they noted “Hong Kong employs “on-demand planning” to develop and refine the system and respond to changing circumstances […] the system is inherently temporal and adaptable.[…] On-demand planning supposedly ensures that the condition generates the form.” (Yoos and James 2016, 11-22), the multi-level pedestrian system is therefore hardly a repetition on units but an adaptive system which depends on the context. It would be great if you can elaborate further why the central-mid level escalators were chosen specifically by the film directors as sets – how was it captured differently by Christopher Nolan in the Dark Knight and Wong Kar Wai in Chungking Express?