If you ever travel to Hong Kong, you'll soon realize that it's totally possible to travel from one destination to another without ever stepping onto a sidewalk or crossing a street. That's because the city is incredibly vertical, both underground in its many skyscrapers. And this terrific book, Cities Without Ground, has awesome schematics laying out the many key neighborhoods.
Wink Books featured the 2012 book on its Tumblr earlier this week, noting:
It maps the underground city inside of Hong Kong. Beneath and between the gleaming skyscrapers built over the cramped confines of Hong Kong proper are miles of subterranean malls, passageways, stairs, subway stations, parking garages, escalators, skybridges, and food courts. This “city without ground” forms a shadow city with its own civic ecology. One can walk for hours without leaving this interior place. This large vernacular space was mapped by architectural students in insane detail. Those diagrams are reproduced here. But there are only a few photos of the places or people; the book is primarily diagrams and maps of this inadvertent terrain, one that was engineered but never designed. The 122-page book was created as a guidebook in sufficient detail to guide you through this unappreciated maze town.
When my parents lived in the Admiralty neighborhood of Hong Kong, I would walk down from their apartment to the connected mall and catch a subway, whose entrance was in the mall. I'd take a train to my mom's office in Causeway Bay, and walk up many flights of stairs/escalators from the subway to the subterranean levels of a mall. And once inside the mall, I'd go up even more flights to have lunch at the food court!
The book is available via Amazon.com, but it may take one or two months to ship!
This week, we're launching Gothamist's travel content, Gothamist Getaways. Four times a year, we'll have a week of posts featuring looks at travel, food, products and tips, near and far, for making your trips more pleasurable. So enjoy and let us know if you have any hints for us—email [email protected].
