The bamboo scaffolding on charred buildings of Wang Fuk Court housing complex following a deadly fire, in Tai Po, Hong Kong, on Friday.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
Jason Wang is an executive member at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre. He is the co-editor of Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic.
On the night of Nov. 26, the skyline of the Hong Kong neighbourhood of Tai Po did not twinkle; it screamed. The blaze at the towers of Wang Fuk Court was not merely a structural fire. It was a terrifying transformation of Hong Kong’s architectural signature – the bamboo scaffold – into a vertical cage of flame.
The toll is staggering: at least 146 dead, scores injured, and hundreds of residents unaccounted for in the blackened maw of the estate. But as the smoke clears over the New Territories, the city must face an issue that goes beyond operational negligence: the betrayal of the urban pact. Experts and early findings by police have suggested that the very mechanisms designed to heal the building – the bamboo, and the use of highly flammable, low-cost polymer boards during the renovation – may have been at least an accessory to its execution.
Hong Kongers often romanticize the city’s bamboo scaffolding. It is its visual shorthand, a celebration of a unique hybridity where flexible, pre-modern craft and culture scales its rigid, modernist density. It distinguishes the skyline from the glass monotony of Shanghai or the steel sterility of Singapore. Yet, on the façade of this 31-storey residential estate comprised of eight towers housing about 4,800 people, that romance may have turned treacherous. When combined with the petrochemical accelerants of nylon netting and polystyrene insulation reportedly on site, the bamboo lattice ceased to be a platform for repair; it became a chimney.
The death toll in Hong Kong's deadly housing complex fire rose on Sunday to at least 146, drawing large crowds to turn up and pay tribute to the victims, amid warnings from Beijing that it would use a national security law to crack down on any 'anti-China' protest in the wake of the blaze.
Reuters
High-rise dwellers the world over would have been right to flinch, too. The home, often viewed as a protective shell, was betrayed in Hong Kong; the window, meant as a vantage point, became a breach point; and the threat didn’t come from the horizon, it climbed the walls. The tower’s verticality – both a symbol of ambition and a common form in cities everywhere – was instantly transformed into a mechanism for the rapid distribution of death.
The French urbanist Paul Virilio famously argued that the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. By extension, the invention of the high-density residential tower is the invention of the towering inferno.
But Wang Fuk Court represents another issue for such buildings: the risks of maintenance.
The estate, completed in 1983, is a concrete relic of the late-colonial “New Town” era. To keep these aging beasts compliant and habitable, they must be wrapped in bandages of renovation. The tragedy thus reveals a core paradox of vertical urbanism: as these structures age, the cost of their survival – the constant wrapping, patching, and cladding – introduces new risks. As we saw in Hong Kong, but also in London’s deadly Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the desperate attempt to extend the viable lifespans of these buildings can play a part in their destruction.
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There is a grim class dimension to Wang Fuk Court’s wreckage: Tai Po developments were built to be cornerstones of the dreams of Hong Kong’s aspirational middle class in the 1970s, when millions of people poured into the city to seek a stake in its booming economy. Today, that promise is a ghost. Many residents are the original owners, and are now elderly. They are the generation that built much of the city’s prosperity; they were trapped in the decaying infrastructure of that bygone era. And for the older residents who struggled to evacuate down smoke-choked stairwells, their “vertical dream” became a trap. The elevation that once promised security was an obstacle to their escape.
Hong Kongers should also finally reckon with the material reality of the bamboo itself. We cling to it as a symbol of resilience and harmony with nature, and it has certainly been useful – it stands up to Hong Kong’s storms and high winds while being more sustainable, cheap and fast to turn into scaffolding. But the Wang Fuk Court disaster exposes the danger of grafting tradition onto hyper-modern density. Bamboo is, ultimately, dried kindling. When you wrap a high-rise in this combustible grass and plastic mesh, it can become a pyre. Thermodynamics do not care for culture.
The charred skeleton of Wang Fuk Court stands as a warning to every vertical city, including in Canada. We have built civilizations that conquer the air, stacking lives in efficient grids and constructing them as quickly as possible to try to address our housing crises. But in our aging metropolises, their greatest threat may be the inherent toxicity of their necessary renewal. The fire at Tai Po proves that when we cut corners on the skin of our cities, we gamble on the bodies within.