Idea
The feature of the overhead bridge that first comes to my mind is, it’s a public good. Non-excludable, it doesn’t cost pedestrians anything to walk on; non-rival, passengers could consume it together. That’s the reason I choose a topic as a public city. However, I recognize that there must be some differences between public city and infrastructure, like the difference between public place and space, as emphasized by De Certeau, M.
Research and Construction
My first research was done to investigate the definition of a public city. The general idea refers public city as the government and citizens work together on public interest, and both of them could represent a part of public interest. This is the difference, the city has to interact with citizens, the people, to be public. The question is, how the overhead bridge becomes a public place, instead of a space dedicated for public use, and how could it present HK as a public city. Through the online research adding pandemic consideration, there are two things I recognize.
Firstly, Hong Kong is a very compact city, and an overhead bridge is initially designed for alleviation of pedestrian congestions. The overhead bridge actually marked the start of HK’s multidimensional city design.
Secondly, pandemic compressed the space of HK by asking people to keep social distance. It contradicts with HK’s situation to be too congested and an overhead bridge could be a public way to alleviate this kind of pressure.
Recognizing these two points, my video is built on discussing how HK uses an overhead bridge to satisfy the public interest. There are two examples.
Firstly, citizens got no place to spend leisure time since public parks and shopping malls restricted access to keep social distance. The role of the overhead bridge is to provide the spaces for enjoying themselves, citizens’ interests, while following the government’s public interest, keeping social distance.
Another example focused on the conflict between citizen’s interests and the government’s interests. Homeless people who lived on the overhead bridge were cleared. I recognized my stand is to support those people using the bridge since they faced some problems like physical restrictions and no affordable rent houses. I question that, under the circumstance that the public space is compressed in this pandemic, whether unutilized public space could be better manipulated to be a public place, for instance, providing a living to homeless people.
In conclusion, I considered HK to be not fully public but closed to it in a pandemic.
Video Production
In video making, I visited some overhead bridges, like the central elevated walkway, the most famous, and others around HK. Since I’m not sophisticated in making videos and some privacy problems are hard to solve, I decide to use mainly photos and sentences to directly convey my ideas to audiences, making things simple and pure. I followed my construction of ideas, as introduced before, to make the video. Some details are added, for instance, connections and positions brought by an overhead bridge, to fulfill the video structure and helps audiences better understand the concept.
For photos, I took shots of them naturally, for instance, citizens spending their leisure were taken without intentional influences. Shooting angle are taken to make sure audiences could get views as they were walking by the real scene. For a small portions of scenes rarely having access, I use photos from other reliable websites. For background music, I use the style with peace, relief, and also a sort of stress and it copes with my topic.
Reference
Uniquely HK
City Life (hkcitylife.com)
Accessed on May 3rd, 2021
Hong Kong’s growing network of walkways, written by Charley Lanyon
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/feb/22/cities-without-ground-hong-kong-walkways
Accessed on May 3rd, 2021
Life Under the Pandemic: How Do the Domestic Helpers Spend Their Holidays, written by Lam Tsz Yau
http://tyr.jour.hkbu.edu.hk/2021/04/12/life-under-the-pandemic-how-do-the-domestic-helpers
Accessed on May 3rd, 2021
Extreme poverty in Hong Kong: homeless life on a footbridge, produced by South China Morning Post
Accessed on May 4th, 2021
In the Midst of a Pandemic, Walk DVRC Wants to Give Hongkongers More Space
In the Midst of a Pandemic, Walk DVRC Wants to Give Hongkongers More Space
Accessed on May 4th, 2021
Rotmeyer, Juliana Adele., and University of Hong Kong. Publicness of Elevated Public Space in Central, Hong Kong: An Inquiry into the Publicness of Elevated Pedestrian Walkway Systems as Places and Non-places [electronic Resource]. 2010. Web.
Hu Manman Frank 3035827926
I like the way you apply the concept of government-public conflict to your analysis. Good use of the voice over and subtitles in the video that guide the views to rethink the conflicts in the public places. Besides, I also enjoy the street photos and snapshots that really catch the natural atmosphere on the street.
You have a nice hypothesis to start with, yet it seems you could do more careful site documentation to argue whether Hong Kong’s public space is being created according to the public interest. Right now your video has covered multiple sites, which the effort is appreciated, but it would be more in-depth if you could focus on one issue to argue your point on public space. How do the pandemic restrictions imposed by the government impacting on the overhead bridge spaces? How is the public coping with/ suffering from them? What is stopping the spaces to become truly public? You could have referenced Yoos and James’ text to support your exploration of “publicness” on overhead bridges instead of journalistic articles. There are a lot of scholarly sources on the topic to enrich your research video.