Author Description

What does it take for a city to become world-class? And who decides? It's not enough to look at a city's economic performance. Great cities have always offered a more fundamental, abstract quality - a quality that no single ranking system has yet been able to measure. Hong Kong Fantasies tries to define that quality, and to introduce a universal standard for its evaluation: The World-Class City Framework - WCCF. Using this framework as a guide, The Why Factory fantasizes that Hong Kong, a city struggling to hold on to its reputation, makes a spectacular comeback as an exemplary world-class city. This fictional urban resuscitation reveals not only the shortcomings of Hong Kong, but also the flaws in the tools with which we assess all cities. In order to improve our cities, we may also have to refine our standards of judgement. Hong Kong Fantasies is based on a workshop and studio organized by The Why Factory in collaboration with the International Forum on Urbanism, the Berlage Institute, the Delft University of Technology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University in Hong Kong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.