Guest Lecture: Short Cuts: Alternative Infrastructures in Hong Kong and Chicago

This event is presented and ticketed by MAS Context. Admission is free, but space is limited.

In Hong Kong—one of the densest cities in the world—a network of pedestrian passages connects public and private space across a challenging topography. This three-dimensional maze runs between train stations, hotels, office towers and housing estates, across boundaries of class and culture. It forms an alternative to the colonial logics under which the city was founded and governed for most of its history, and provides grounds for discourse about its political future.

In Chicago, the city's Pedway links residential and commercial buildings to transportation facilities underneath the city's downtown core. Offering the possibility of movement outside Chicago's famous grid, it creates opportunities, like getting lost, that work against the city's founding logics of modernity and exchange.

As "short-cuts," both of these networks share a role in providing escapes from their city's primary structures and organizing narratives, and show that in alternative space, alternative cultures can thrive.

AIA/CES Credit: 2 LUs

This program is a part of MAS Context’s 2018 Fall Talks series. MAS Context, a quarterly journal created by MAS Studio, addresses issues that affect the urban context. Each issue delivers a comprehensive view of a single topic through the active participation of people from different fields and different perspectives who, together, instigate the debate.