Every afternoon, a distinctive click-clack sound floats through the woods of Bishop Hill, a short walk from some of Hong Kong’s most densely packed neighbourhoods. It’s the clatter of mah-jong tiles being shuffled in a lean-to near the summit of this leafy elevation, once home to an underground reservoir whose ruins are now a public attraction.
To get to the makeshift mah-jong parlour, you must walk along dirt paths lined by yellow bamboo and the hanging roots of banyan trees, past benches and tables installed not by the government but by nearby residents. Those same neighbours — most of them elderly — have converted clearings into gyms with improvised exercise equipment attached to trees, shrines populated by donated figures of Chinese gods, and small gardens growing flowers, herbs and vegetables. There’s even an assembly of ping-pong tables.
Bishop Hill is far from unique. There are enough of these do-it-yourself recreational spaces that a local concern group called TrailWatch began a study to document what they call ‘backyard trails’. More than 1.5 million people live within a short walk of the 11 spaces that TrailWatch looked at in particular, but there are even more across Hong Kong, often located in the interstitial spaces between high-rise neighbourhoods and the city’s vast network of country parks. One of them even has a koi pond built and maintained by seniors living nearby.
There isn’t an obvious direct link between informal recreational spaces and the well-being of Hong Kong’s elderly people, who make up nearly a quarter of the city’s population. But the spaces are popular: the most visited attracts up to 1,500 people per day on weekends, according to TrailWatch. And it’s impossible to ignore the important role they play in the lives of the people who use them. They keep pensioners in shape while offering them an opportunity to socialise and exercise autonomy over their surroundings — no doubt a refreshing change from the small flats and strictly regimented public spaces that are common in Hong Kong’s urban areas.
The relationship between the government and the people who use and maintain the backyard trails is sometimes fraught; in one area known as Duckling Hill, informal constructions have been regularly demolished, only to be quickly rebuilt. But increasingly, authorities seem to be turning a blind eye to such unauthorised interventions. The challenge now will be to not simply ignore them but to work with Hong Kong’s elderly population to manage these spaces in a collaborative way — perhaps through a co-creative design process that officially enshrines grassroots ingenuity.
There’s a precedent for embracing spaces like these. Many of the so-called Morning Trails inside Hong Kong’s country parks, were adapted from informal paths used by elderly people for exercise at the break of day, as were some early ‘morning walker’s gardens’. The backyard trails are similar, but even more versatile: the informal interventions have given them much of what an ageing population needs to stay happy and healthy.
