"Counterpart Cities: Climate Change and Collaborative Action in Hong Kong & Shenzhen" will open at the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture on December 8th. Led by a curatorial team from the University of Hong Kong, the work suggests the collaboration of regional resources given impetus and/ or affected by climate change: Climate change as opportunity. Alongside wide-ranging research introducing the complexity of the region through the lens of major natural and man-made infrastructures, three design teams from Hong Kong and three from Shenzhen will exhibit their visions for the regional cooperation of ports, freshwater delivery systems and cross-border ecologies. The project will also be exhibited in Hong Kong in Spring 2012.
Design's primary role in these projects, especially for the ports and freshwater distribution systems, is not its effect on logistics or physical operations, but instead its capacity to register the political-cultural differences between Hong Kong and Shenzhen; not so they can be merged, but rather maintain and engender unique characteristics while increasing social and/or political and economic productivity.
Projections are not concrete predictions but an instrument of risk that can induce greater change. Instead of merely technical approaches that focus on prevention, design has the additional capacity to foresee and prepare, organize complex systems and mark the necessity of delivering these projects to the public, whether the actual projection occurs or not. Sea-level rise is the general measure to which most of the issues are attributed. We must remember that it is both tangible because it is given measure, somewhat symbolically a quantification of the risk associated with regional inundation, but also intangible for its long time-span, gradual nature.
Posted by: Ashley Scott Kelly (ashleyscottkelly.com)