BOOK: The Urban Design of Impermanence

The notion of impermanence underlies the urban design language of Hong Kong to a significant extent. The city’s intensely urban environment has long reflected embedded patterns of change and temporality in both physical and cultural dimensions—a forever reconstructed city of dislocation, adaptation and imagination. These characteristics are intrinsically interwoven with street and spatial patterns, producing a sense of immediacy and transience, ingrained within the fabric and memory of the city. 

This collection of sketches, illustrations and essays by Peter Cookson Smith seeks to reflect the evolving character and personality of Hong Kong—an informality in the way its older streets, urban places, and spaces are used, and how this encodes the ‘everyday’ experience of the city through a profusion of visual incident, expression, and an intensity of fragmented features that exude Hong Kong’s high density urban values.