I may never do another “Tweet of the Week” on ATC, but I couldn’t resist sharing this one of New Year’s Eve on Well Street in Manchester’s city centre.

So much going on this pic of New Year in Manchester by the Evening News. Like a beautiful painting. pic.twitter.com/szKKRM4U4i

— Roland Hughes (@hughesroland) January 1, 2016

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The photo was taken by Joel Goodman and first appeared in this online picture gallery.

But then Roland Hughes of the BBC remarked that its composition was similar to a Renaissance painting and that the guy in blue laying in the middle of the street, reaching for his beer, could be thought of as a parody of the reaching God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. So he tweeted it out. Since then it has gone viral.

For those of us who weren’t in Manchester on New Year’s Eve, we clearly missed one epic party.

This morning my friend Mackenzie Keast – who is famous and was on the radio in Toronto today talking about The Laneway Project – sent me an interesting article from the Guardian talking about the marginalization and growing irrelevance of city planners. It’s called: For the sake of our cities, it’s time to make town planning cool again.

The gist of the article is as follows:

While the cult of the star architect has soared over the decades and property developers have displaced bankers as the new super-rich, the figure of the local town planner has become comic shorthand for a certain kind of faceless, under-whelming dullard.

But what really stood out for me are the following two things. First, that people are genuinely interested in cities. I would say that it’s almost trendy to be into cities these days.

Urbanism may have displaced cultural theory as the favoured subject of the academic hipster, but talented young men and women rarely consider becoming town planners.

And second, that we’ve made it difficult for these same interested people to participate in the planning process.

Planners have become simultaneously under-respected and over-professionalised. Their training and practice too often leaves them able to communicate effectively only with other planners and professionals, working in an abstract language that alienates them from people. People are occasionally allowed into the professional planner’s world, but in highly mediated terms dictated by the profession.

This stands out for me because I think that architecture is in a somewhat similar position. I often joke that the more architecture training someone has, the more likely they’re going to like buildings that the rest of the world doesn’t. It all becomes quite insular – just like the Guardian is arguing with respect to planning.

And that may in fact be the reason for the marginalization of both planners and architects (minus the few starchitects that have a distinct brand and can command a premium). If the general public doesn’t like what you do or understand how you create value, why should they care?

I’ve written before about the future of the architecture profession, as well as the reasons for why I decided to never practice architecture. So I won’t repeat it all here.

But I will say that it had nothing to do with me not loving architecture. Because I do and always will. Instead, it was about recognizing that professions are not set in stone. Just like pretty much everything else in this world, they can and will be reinvented.

Image: The Guardian / PA

The “ground plane” is an important reference in architecture. The ground is typically where people walk. The ground is where our fabricated buildings meet the earth. And the ground is where our experience of the urban environment–however good or bad it may be–truly takes shape. Often times I feel that we, city dwellers, spend far too much time worrying about the height of buildings and not enough time worry about the ground floor.

But what if there were no clearly defined ground plane? This morning I stumbled upon an interesting book called, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook. The authors call it “a manifesto for a new theory of urban form.” And the argument is that Hong Kong has developed a unique series of public/private spaces that allow it to function as a fully three-dimensional city. 

Through underground tunnels, above ground walkways, escalators, and other connective infrastructure, Hong Kong is reinventing the way we typically think about cities–both from a user experience and a real estate standpoint. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian architecture and design blog:

The phenomenon began in the 1960s, when the Hongkong Land company, one of the main developers in the region, built an elevated walkway to connect a luxury hotel to the second storey of an adjacent shopping mall. An insignificant move, perhaps, but it in fact had the effect of changing the rentable values within the building: suddenly the mall’s second floor units could be rented out for more than those at ground level. It entirely recalibrated the vertical logic of real estate value.

Now, you could argue that Hong Kong is a unique place. And it is. Other, less dense cities, have found above and below grade walkways to be a destroyer of urban vibrancy. But in Hong Kong it works and, as many other cities around the world focus their energies on urban intensification, we may find that Hong Kong is indeed a new model for urban form.