Hong Kong is one of the most developed urban centers  and one of the most essential economic nodes in the world. If it were a country unto itself (it is administered by mainland China), it would be the third most densely populated nation in the world with 6,200 people per square kilometer. It is known as ‘the world’s most vertical city’, as it has the largest number of people living or working above the 14th floor of any city on the globe. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers of any other city as well, with 6,439. Michael Wolf has an excellent photo series (I actually used one of his images for the background of this site) on the skyscraper landscape of Hong Kong that I think really captures the overwhelming sense of metropolis that the city produces:

And here’s a video that shows the overwhelming size of Hong Kong from a helicopter:

One of the things that impresses me the most about Hong Kong is the fact that its architecture could go anywhere within the first world, most of those buildings would look perfectly natural in Houston or Hamburg if transplanted from Hong Kong. I think this is a result of globalization: architectural firms are designing buildings all over the world now, and that has produced a surprisingly homogeneous global architecture style of glass facades and concrete cliffs.

Another impression that Hong Kong leaves me is that it, along with other Asian megacities like Tokyo, are indicators of where Eastern Asia is headed. Hong Kong had its building boom in the 1960’s, wheras there are many Asian cities that are in a similar building boom right now. Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi and other such cities are building rapidly for their exploding populations. As urban density increases, I think that those cities will begin to look built up in a similar way compared to Hong Kong. They won’t be nearly as dense, as Hong Kong is heavily restricted by its own geography, but due to the overwhelming amount of people  moving to Asian cities at the moment, they will need to build up and out with haste. In fact, more than half of the world’s skyscrapers that are currently under construction are located in Asian cities. Almost all of the rest of that figure belong to cities in the Middle East, notably Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The urbanization of Asia is leading to the construction of first-world cities outside of North America and Europe, and the balance of world power is shifting similarly.

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