Dwelling on Earth: Hong Kong in the History of How We Live

Where does Hong Kong fit into the global story of how we live? That’s not exactly the central question in Stefan Al’s new book Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home. But it is indeed one of the things that Al discusses in this concise but deeply researched exploration of housing, which brings archaeology, anthropology, architecture and social history into a remarkably compelling package. 

“I lived in Hong Kong for three years,” explains Al, a Dutch-born architect who previously ran the University of Hong Kong’s urban design programme before moving to Hunter College in New York. “So I’m probably somewhat biassed. But as a case study, I think Hong Kong is really interesting.”

To understand why, it helps to step back about two million years. Yes, you read that correctly — it’s the kind of scope that Dwelling on Earth manages to condense into just 258 pages of text. Al begins his story with the primitive cave homes created by our hominid ancestors, before they started using mammoth bones to fashion more sophisticated dwellings. What sets Dwelling on Earth apart in its genre is the way it weaves between different academic disciplines to create a fleshed-out portrait of where and how people lived even in prehistoric times. 

“What surprised me as I was doing research was that there was actually a lot of new material out there that hadn’t been covered much,” says Al. Satellite imagery, DNA analysis and LiDAR — infrared beams that can detect hidden underground structures — have given archaeologists powerful new tools to uncover and understand ancient settlements. But their conclusions haven’t been shared much outside the discipline, especially in the architecture and urban planning world.

“Some of these findings challenge the status quo of how we think about living, and also about settlements such as the first cities,” says Al. Thanks to new research, we now know that some of the world’s largest ancient cities were located in Southeast Asia, notably Angkor, whose population may well have peaked at 900,000 in the 13th century. 

Bringing these findings to life required a delicate balance on Al’s part. “It was a bit of a struggle because, after going over hundreds of papers, I started to write a little bit like an archaeologist,” he says, chuckling. “Very hypothetical, everything — ‘This may or may not be, probably, likely, possibly.’”

Al was able to evade such heavily qualified language in his descriptions of some ancient settlements like Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that existed in southern Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, about 9,000 years ago. With all of its mud-brick houses packed together, Çatalhöyük had no streets: residents walked on rooftops and entered their homes through holes in the ceiling. Those holes also served as not-quite-effective exhaust vents for the hearths that were burning inside each home for cooking and heating — something archaeologists learned when they found dark soot inside the chest cavities of the skeletons they uncovered in their digs. 

Private spaces, public impact

What becomes clear in reading Dwelling on Earth is that the way we build our homes shapes not only our lives but all the lives around us. Some of the earliest cities in the world, in Mesopotamia and the Levant, were essentially vast agglomerations of rural households that shared resources; there was no centre and no obvious power structure. As urban society evolved in places like ancient Greece, Rome and China, however, living spaces began to reflect social stratification, wealth inequity and more complex forms of power encoded in the built environment.

Ancient Rome is a key example. At its peak in the second century AD, Rome had a population of one million people squeezed into 15 square kilometres. This extreme density was enabled by a vast trading network and innovations like aqueducts that supplied running potable tap water, but also by the world’s first multi-storey apartment blocks, known as insulae. Though many of these buildings were squalid, overcrowded tenements, they were also home to many middle-class families who couldn’t afford the extravagant cost of owning a domus or single-family villa. 

That density had many tradeoffs, not the least of which was rampant communicable disease. But it also made Rome more resilient in the face of outside threats. Even as the enormous Roman empire crumbled, its capital was never quite abandoned. That wasn’t the case for Angkor, which had a similar population but sprawled over nearly 100 times as much land area, thanks to a built form that consisted mainly of thatch-roofed huts with individual gardens. 

When the Little Ice Age of the mid-14th century made the weather colder and more unpredictable, residents abandoned Angkor for the countryside. It eventually collapsed under its own proverbial weight, with too few people left to sustain the enormous amount of infrastructure required for such a vast city. Today, there is no trace of the ordinary cityscape of Angkor, only its greatest monuments, including the famous temple, or wat, that is all most people know about this erstwhile metropolis.

Leading by example

In a way, this is where Hong Kong comes into the picture. In a way not dissimilar to ancient Rome, the symbols of wealth and power in early Hong Kong — the opulent mansions and imposing colonial edifices — rested on a foundation of jam-packed tenements home to masses of workers. When the city boomed after the aerial bombardments and deprivation of World War II, its existing housing stock was woefully unmatched by the surge of immigrants fleeing poverty and instability in mainland China. That led to massive shantytowns, which led to fires, which eventually led to public housing that now houses more than half the city’s population.

That public housing — as well as the privately-built estates that were also built in the 1960s and 70s — took the form of high-rise modernist housing blocks. They trace their roots to the ideas of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who advocated for standardised, mass-produced high-rose housing surrounded by greenery. In other countries, particularly the United States, this particular type of development quickly became associated with deprivation, isolation and social dysfunction. Many blamed the architecture. And yet, in Hong Kong, the model worked spectacularly well.

“Hong Kong is probably the best case we have in the world,” says Al. He credits the success with forward-thinking planning that ensured housing estates are well integrated with shops, services and community facilities — and especially transport. The development of a dense, high-rise city in conjunction with the expansion of the MTR has created a city with some of the best — and best-used — public transport in the world. That in turn has given Hong Kong some of the lowest per-capita transport-related carbon emissions in the world, a significant achievement considering that transportation accounts for 37 percent of global CO2 emissions.

“Different countries dealt with the global population boom differently,” says Al. “In the United States, it was the story of the mass production of suburbia.” Sprawling development reliant on automobiles became the norm in the US, not only because of market forces, but because of public subsidies and policy changes that encouraged this low-density style of building. “In Hong Kong, by contrast, you see the mass production of these high-rise clusters. It’s a very different narrative,” notes Al.

A bright future?

One of the threads running through Dwelling on Earth is the way our domestic environments inadvertently impact the environment, which has often led to the abandonment of those very living spaces. Over and over again in the ancient world, deforestation near burgeoning settlements led to soil erosion that worsened floods, forcing people to leave. That disruption pales in comparison to what we are now facing with human-induced climate change.

And yet Dwelling on Earth is nothing if not optimistic. It ends by cataloguing the many ways in which architects are making houses more environmentally responsible, sometimes by going back to more ancient ways of living, like “passive houses,” first developed in Canada and later refined in Europe, which use as little energy as possible thanks to extra-thick insulation and triple-glazed windows. 

Al also documents innovations like laminated timber — in which wood is compressed to create steel-strength beams — along with new approaches to old traditions, including Vietnamese architect Võ Trọng Nghĩa’s dramatic structures based on traditional bamboo scaffolding.

“A lot of it is invisible,” says Al. “In the United States, we’ve seen at least a 50 percent improvement in the energy efficiency of buildings, because the energy codes make it mandatory for new buildings to have a certain insulating standard. In a passive house that’s super well insulated, you wouldn’t really see the difference unless you look at your energy bills.”

He points out another, more complicated issue: embodied energy. It takes an enormous amount of power to create concrete, which alone is responsible for up to 85 percent of the carbon emissions of each building project. (Steel accounts for up to 50 percent, if it is the main structural material used.) That could be replaced to a much greater extent by renewable resources like bamboo or timber, which remove carbon from the atmosphere as they grow and can be replaced when they are cut down. But building technologies, industry standards and policies need to catch up.

It’s a lot to think about. And that’s exactly the point. “The main takeaway is that your house is not just a place where you live, it’s also how you live,” says Al. “It really shapes everything from social relationships to public health to the environmental sustainability of the planet.” He pauses. “We often look at monumental buildings. But really, we should take the house very seriously. This is how and where we live.”

All illustrations courtesy Stefan Al.