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After months of relative solitude Maya and I have had a series of visitors over the past few months. After school broke up Satish came for three weeks, Ayeisha came in late August and Prabhat and his wife Judith in September. Skype and Facetime is all very well, but you don’t realise how quickly your children grow from a four inch screen.

From a certain angle, Satish now appears taller than me. From any bathroom scale, I still appear heavier than him. This is the two of us on Mount Hakone with Fuji 25 kilometres behind us. The crater on Hakone has been murmuring since April, but on June 30^th (about five weeks before we arrived) there was a small eruption of ash and steam and it has been spewing ever since. We all dutifully walked up to the candela to see the lava but the Japanese are nowadays as health and safety conscious as the Hong Kongers and the area was all taped off. The beautiful resort was almost empty and the three of us had a 600 seat Mississippi paddle-steamer to ourselves.

I’d been to Japan once before, in mid-90s just when its quarter century long economic ‘malaise’ started. You all know the story – low growth, ballooning Government debt (largely owed to its own citizens so IMF has demurred from doing a Greece on the country), ageing and shrinking population (1 million fewer people each year from now on), and an endless series of Governmental macroeconomic defibrillations to get spending going. I had expected the country to resemble some economic ghost town – another France, except with decent food. But it wasn’t like that at all. It’s the most fantastic country. The shrinking population of young (there are almost twice as many 60-64 year olds as 0-4 year olds) have ceased to worry about getting a salaryman jobs since there are none, and seem content to mooch around on bikes and hang out in excellent coffee shops and cheap cafés.

The Japanese put thought and pride into the most mundane objects and everyday places. Look at the first two pics below: the first is an immaculately manicured and reasonably priced restaurant in Uneo, the second shows the torrent of technology bestowed into this renewably powered, LED lit, heat-pump cooled beverage dispenser in Ikebukuro. But the third pic shows Japan getting it horribly wrong, demonstrating why middle age men should not run records labels. It was taken in a pub in the basement of the Sony Building in Sinjuku. Last time I went there in the 90s it was a temple to Sony’s creative fizz. Now all six floors were themed around Maria Carey, linked no doubt to her recently signing to Epic records. I am not joking – look at the album covers behind and the beer mat! I wish her better luck on Epic than enjoyed by Michael Jackson and Witney Houston.

There’s a great book “Bending Diversity” about Japan by David Pilling written in the aftermath of the Tsunami showing how modern Japan copes with the its legacy of being the first non-Western developed country, being reviled and still living down its role before and during the Second World War and its stoicism in the face of its vulcanic and typhoon prone geography.

In August Ayeisha briefly visited. We all went to the excellent Nan Lian garden and then a Venetian piazza in Macau complete with gondolas.

Macau is a weird place. It’s about an hour’s high-speed boat ride from HK and soon to be linked to HK by a 50 km bridge. It is now, like Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China. It was administered by the Portuguese between 1557 to 1999, a far longer span than the Brits occupied HK. It’s much smaller than HK. At the moment its reported to have the second or fifth highest GDP per head in the world depending on who’s counting. But much of this economic activity is in the gambling sector. The gamblers are drawn from highly regulated Mainland China and Hong Kong, but Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corrupt officials has resulted in a massive drop in tourist flows. Much of the ‘domestic production’ anyway gets whisked away by the owners of the huge casinos: Las Vegas Sands who own the Venetian, the Hong Kong listed Galaxy. There is still some culture here – a rather good museum and the poetically superficial façade of the St Paul’s church, which echoes the relative importance of the Church to Mammon. Macanese food (in Hong Kong) is great but Ayeisha and I struggled to find a Macanese restaurant on the gambling island of Cotai.

In September my brother and sister-in law arrived for a conference cum holiday. It was their first time in HK and thanks to the city’s compactness we managed to cram in a diverse programme of culture, food, beach and hiking activities in their three days of free time. Prabhat, armed with a guidebook bought my ex-colleagues from NEST, exposed me to a whole bunch of places in Wan Chai that I didn’t know existed; even a temple in Wan Chai, next they’ll build a cathedral in the City of London!

On the Saturday before the mid autumn festival we climbed a small hill in Kowloon, with a band of couch surfers, and watched the full moon. We fingered Hong Konger’s beloved moon cakes and discretely threw them away when backs were turned cursing their calories and awful taste.

Everyone’s gone back now. Maya wore jeans over the weekends. Despite my higher-spec insulation, I will only be able to sustain shorts and T-shirts for a couple more weeks. As Ned Stark so ominously and repetitively points out in Game of Thrones – “Winter is coming.”

Our new flat is on the 32nd floor of a 63-storey block. This is the highest I have ever lived by a margin of 30 floors (unless you count a week in the Algarve where I vaguely remember needing to take a lift to access our room).
We moved in over a month ago and the view from our flat still takes my breath away. I wake up to see some of the world’s biggest cruise liners glide into the cruise terminal juxtaposed with sampans quietly wending their way across the harbour. Looming behind all this is the 602m Kowloon Peak barely a kilometre from the sea.
Life in this sort of flat is a very different life to what we were used to. Exiting the building can take five minutes, with numerous doors and two lifts to navigate making you more inclined to hunker down at home once you’re inside. It’s small: 670 sq. feet, which is still large by Hong Kong standards – the average flat size being 450 sq. feet.
The atmosphere is like that of a holiday resort – the development boasts a shaded 25m all-year swimming pool, massive gym with sea views, café, Jacuzzi, BBQ space and lots of rooms for hire: bowling, snooker, events and music. While there’s no green space within the complex there are two municipal parks nearby. We do have an elevated walkway with exercise equipment and a tiny allotment for children to grow flowers and vegetables. The Internet speed is a blistering 50Mbps. The ISP was apologetic it couldn’t deliver the 1000Mbs available to others in the building. It had to restrict speeds for new customers because of a local capacity constraint. The building is popular with expats from Japan and Korea as there’s a Korean school just opposite so there is a great variety of excellent restaurants for the well-heeled executives. There’s quite a few ABC (American Born Chinese) judging by the accents. So far we’ve not properly met many other people and I still wouldn’t recognise my neighbours. Despite the having so many people packed together, it feels an anonymous place to live. Developments like this are sprouting up all over Hong Kong and other big cities.
Tower blocks are more made from electricity, than from matter. Our building has four high speed lifts, pumps to supplement the standard head of pressure, so drinking water can attain the building’s 210m summit, air conditioners to shed the heat gained from its acres of glass. Our electricity supplier, Hong Kong Electric, has maintained a reliability of supply of 99.999% since 1997 – which translates into around three minutes of unintended break in supply a year.

People sometimes compare Hong Kong’s appearance to the set from Blade Runner. But this is inaccurate, far too dystopic. A better Philip K Dick comparator would be the anaesthetically clean cityscape from Minority Report. Why are such vertical cities catching on? And how green are they?

Hong Kong has built vertically because land is scarce, developers have cheap access to capital and the electricity supply is highly reliable. For the other cities seeking to copy Hong Kong’s upward trajectory, reliable electricity is the most difficult precondition to meet: capital is anyway mobile (Hong Kong’s developers are turning this same trick in many other cities) and land scarcity is happening everywhere – the automatic consequence of urbanisation and local politicians natural aversion to annoying their current stable of voters.
That constructing tower blocks is favoured by developers should surprise no-one. Hendersons, the developer that built our home, says in its annual report: “Our strategy is to acquire sites with good potential for future value enhancement through development density intensification.”
And have they intensified! The tactic of developers is to get hold of prime land – either prising it off the people in the pre-existing 5-10 storey walk-ups, getting Government to create it afresh through land reclamation, or take over some green space – then quickly build the new tower block. Our development has 2000 flats spread over its five buildings. Looked at from Google maps its footprint is a mere 5000 square metres. By way of contrast our home in London, population 2, had a footprint of 100 square metres, and Highgate ward where we lived has a population of 10,000 and an area of 3,000,000 square metres (admittedly including quite a bit of Hampstead Heath). So my block is something like 40 to 240 times more densely populated than where we lived in central London. Land prices in Hong Kong are higher than those in London but not that much more expensive. The insanity that is the Hong Kong property market means that our flat in Hong Kong costs around 50% more than our home in UK despite being a third of the size and using around 2.5% of the genuinely scarce commodity – land. So the value-added created by the massive intensification of land use from high-rise living is not split between the developer and the resident. It’s shared between the developer and the Government.
Developers make a killing. Hong Kong has 55 US dollar billionaires compared to UK’s 53. The founder of Henderson’s is number two on the Forbes’ Hong Kong list with US$25billion. Number one, $33 billion, is of course Li Ka-shing who made his initial fortune from Cheung Kong property, Hong Kong’s biggest property company in the 1970s. His wealth now spills over into every other sector (like UK’s Superdrug and London’s electricity network company). Converting land into gold has proven a highly reliable form of alchemy. It magically transforms Hong Kongers’ prodigious work ethic, the increase in population from net Chinese migration and the gains in productivity from technological change and converts it into the wealth for the lucky few who have cornered the property market.
Government makes a killing too. Through the Land Premium charge developers have to hand over 80% of the gain in value from the intensification of land use to the Government. Last year the charge raised HK$84 billion, around two thirds more than the Government earned from salaries tax. Following the 2015 Budget the newspapers mocked the finance secretary for once again getting his budget forecast wrong. But the similarity with George Osborn ends there. The hapless minister’s error was for the 9th year running to underestimate the size of the budget surplus – HK$64bn instead of HK$9bn resulting in a giveaway budget cutting income tax on the lowest band of earnings.

Other cities are catching the high rise bug. Our building is the 51st tallest in Hong King, at 209 m. The Belchers estate in the west of Hong Kong island used to be the world’s tallest residential block, at 221m, until 2001 when Dubai started the frenetic development of its marina. In the last 15 years the world has gone on a high rise building boom and the tallest residential block, still under construction, will be 541m tall. Hong Kong used to be leader in building tall but now this model is being copied everywhere.
Are high rise buildings green? Well certainly they can be, especially in the hands of the Chinese. In the video a 57 storey ultra green building is constructed in just 19 days. It has walls with 20 cm of insulation, quadruple glazing and uses trigeneration to produce heat, cool and power. It is built off site to speed up construction, and reduce onsite pollution, risk to workers and noise. Carbon dioxide emissions have been cut by 80%.
China is making a reasonable claim to hard wiring resource efficiency into its every endeavour. But here in non-dirigiste Hong Kong I’m not sure. The developer builds to the minimum standard set by Government and no more. Double glazing which could reduce the need for air conditioning is unknown and even a simple technology like low-E window panes to reflect the hot wavelengths is uncommon. If you want a good laugh about lax building codes look like take a look at Hong Kong’s 2012 Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance which sets no standards at all on the building envelope for homes, and a few weak standards on air conditioning, lifts and lighting circuits. Buildings rarely have verandas or overhangs over the windows to reflect the bright sunlight. Instead air conditioning thunders away all summer. Government has just introduced a new requirement in April this year that residential buildings that want to apply for special concessions for green / amenity features have to be better insulated, and any area of verandas will be disregarded from the maximum floor area the developer is allowed to build on the site. But with just 3% of homes being built every year it will take decades for the energy efficiency to improve.
Energy efficiency standards are lax for appliances too. In a recent trip to the electronics chain Broadway’s, every appliance marked as grade 1 on the energy label. However my A+ fridge in UK uses just a third of the electricity of the grade 1 fridge here in Hong Kong. The current energy label standards (being revamped in November this year) are woefully lax.

High rise living is green but not because high rise buildings are intrinsically less energy intense. Small compact flats still need tough building codes to make them green. The big difference in compact living is that it radically changes the economics of mass transportation. Public transport buses as well as the MTR have high occupancy and as a result high frequency creating a virtuous circle. There are two floors of car park in our block but this isn’t many given the size of the development. Many of my colleagues don’t know how to drive, never mind don’t own a vehicle. If you only Hong Kong could learn to love bikes. The picture above is taken from the entrance to the wide seaside promenade next to my flat!

Swimming in the local municipal swimming pool is not usually considered a hazardous sport…but a Saturday morning dip in Kowloon Park should be. Once in the water all Hong Kong’s usual conventions sanctifying personal space cease to apply. Kamikaze fifty year olds hurl themselves in the water. Lean nimrods in Speedos juggernaut through the water unswerving, their plastic heads retracted . There’s giggles from women chatting around the sides of the pool using the water just to cool down. There are relatively few children in the pool they’re too busy cramming for their next academic hurdle.

Keeping fit in Hong Kong can be a challenge. Because the city has been carved out of a mountain it’s hard to walk any distance without hitting some giddy gradient. The streetscape to the left, taken just outside my old house in Kennedy Town, shows the challenge of  jogging or simply walking on the ribbon of land around the harbour. Walkers are fenced in on the narrow pavements and jostle for space with street furniture, shop overspill and construction work. And Hong Kongers  umbrellas are as multifunctional as Douglas Adams’ towels –unfurled in fog, rain and bright sunshine alike – staking a half metre square claim on the pavement. Umbrellas usual depiction is as the mark of democratic protest, but to me they signify a threatened jab in the eye despite my undemanding stature. It’s rare to see children playing in the parks or streets. The city is asking itself soul-searching questions why its children are measurably weaker than other southeast Asian countries’, including children from China. The girl below is  a delightful exception. What terrible child exploitation and on a bank holiday!

Hopefully an inspiration for my kids

So how come Hong Kongers are so skinny compared to westerners? The secret is of course they eat less, and avoid carbs. Portion are small. In Pret-a-Manger the standard sandwich size is half that in the UK. In Cantonese meals rice is served at the end, as an afterthought and largely thrown away. There’s little use for wheat – bread is sold by the half dozen slices – often with the crusts shaved off. I’ve been served ‘All-day breakfast’ with just half a slice of bread.

Lack of exercise isn’t a problem for seniors. Perhaps its because they spent their formative years in a different era that the parks, especially in  early morning, are filled with septuagenarians walking, stretching on the kids climbing frames or doing their Tai Chi. For the first time in my life I can go for a jog in the park and enjoy that giddy feeling or overtaking someone else.
Luckily the space that has been designated for sports activities – the swimming pools, gyms and sports fields run by Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department are exemplary. For just HK$17 (about £1.50) you get to swim in spotlessly clean, Olympic size swimming pools perched on some of the most scenic real estate in the territory: overlooking the harbour or tucked in the parks. With public services so good the policy issue becomes how to ration them? In the case of Kowloon swimming pool on Saturday morning the answer is you don’t; thankfully the pools on Hong Kong Island are much less busy. But accessing the gyms or the Government organised sailing or windsurfing facilities means having to attend the compulsory half-day training course. These are held once a month and there’s a waiting list. The other gym option is the outlandishly expensive private gyms (none of which have swimming pools) aimed at the rich and chic.

Our bikes arrived with our luggage and I’ve started to cycle the 3km distance from our new home to the office. Saying that Hong Kong island is not designed with cyclists in mind is like saying Ikea store-designers do not plan for their customers to leave with just the one item they wanted. The whole of Hong Kong Island has been designed to either infuriate or kill cyclists. My Homerian commute involves first exiting the building, through a dozen fire doors and lifts, to a street system where drivers hoot you every few seconds, outraged or perhaps terrified to share space with cyclists. There have been cyclist 46 deaths so far this year – quite incredible given how few cyclists there are. It’s actually possible to walk to my office off-road on a gorgeous sea promenade through Quarry Bay park, through the huge Taikoo Shing housing estate, past sign posts that angrily warn: “You will be prosecuted for cycling “. In the UK, one cyclist I know’s favourite hobby is zipping through red lights and sail over paths he/she’s not supposed to. In Hong Kong, where they don’t have proper crimes, jaywalking and cycling on footpaths, relatively speaking, are proper crimes. One of my more Taoist colleagues, sensing my frustration, asked the profound question, do you cycle to work because you want exercise or because you want to reach here. What would Yoda have said to that? She answered before I could slip in “both favour I would” saying, “For exercise there is the gym, for travel there is the MTR or bus”. And in a way she’s right. Hong Kong’s success is down to its efficient ability to cater for conformity,  plurality of want is much harder to accomodate.

Our new apartment. We’re on 32 floor. You might see the Brompton bike in our terrace

Another option to become fit I am seriously considering is eschewing the use of lifts. That’s not as dumb as it sounds. My office is on the 8^th floor and my new apartment is on the 32^nd. Quick maths tests – how many floors would would I climb everyday if I abandoned the lift ? Wrong. It’s important  to understand floor numbers here are ordinal rather than cardinal concepts. Most blocks miss out floors ending with a “4” (deemed unlucky). My office block misses out 4, 13, 14 15, 24; what would Fibonacci make of that? My apartment block starts counting floors at 7. There’s a story about a developer getting into trouble for selling a 68th floor penthouse in a 46 storey building. Floors 40 to 59 were missing – I presume because there were insufficient buyers and he had some high rollers on his back itching to sue if they didn’t get their pre-paid penthouses pronto.

The other way of keeping fit is hiking on the trails. But in May with the temperature hovering around 30ºC from dawn to dusk this is getting hard. The last time I walked up Victoria Peak from Kennedy Town I took this photograph of Lamma Island. I am currently mainly working on Hong Kong’s electricity market reform. The weirdest thing about the energy policy here, for a Londoner, is that 80% of Hong Kong’s electricity is generated within the territory. The island of Lamma just off the Hong Kong Island and easily visible from the Peak provides a quarter of the territory’s electricity. The balance between fossil fuels and renewables is all too visible in the photo. The 800kW wind turbine is barely visible next to the  4GW coal and gas plant. There’s also a small 550kW solar PV also on the site which is near invisible in the photo and equally absent in the output statistics.

Keeping fit watching the dragon boat race at Tai Tam

Maya and I were glued to our phones on the Friday of the UK elections. Being six hours ahead the results came in over the course of the day. Maya was working in the British Consulate and she and her colleagues were all crowded around the TV, I was in my office patiently explaining about the UK election process and why was there a Green Party. Hong Kong will be holding its district elections in November this year, but few of my colleagues are registered to vote. When the districts were last contested, in 2007, only 1.1 million votes were cast from an adult population nearing 6.2 million. Everyone in Hong Kong is allowed to vote except foreigners, prisoners and the small garrison of the PLA. There are 412 district councillors in HK’s 18 districts councillors. They have similar powers to those in UK– bread and butter issues: local bus routes, social housing, waste collection. The noisy pan-democrats that are lobbying so hard for changes to the election for Chief Executive, got 40% of the vote compared to 55% for the pro-Beijing parties – mainly in the wealthy and westernised districts. It will be interesting to see whether this shifts in a few months time.