The 263 islands of Hong Kong are home to 7.2 million people. Thats 67,000 per square mile nearly three times more crowded than New York making Hong Kong one of the densest cities in the world. People seem to like the frenzy. (At least the average banker would rather live high atop Jardines Lookout than in the smog of Beijing.) So why not increase the population of Hong Kong by fifty percent? Thats the brilliant plan of the Chinese government.

With their combination of bureaucracy, corruption, incompetence and arrogance, governments are not always the wisest of urban planners. So visionary architects ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier to Archigram once made it their business to propose alternative futures. Though few of their plans were ever more than cyanotype dreams, their schemes challenged the status quo, helping people to envision what their society might become. The architect was a sort of public intellectual. It wasnt very profitable.

Hong Kong Is Land. 2014. The Island of Surplus. Courtesy MAP Office.

And in the age of the jetsetting starchitect, it isnt exactly fashionable. With the death of Lebbeus Woods in 2012, many urbanists eulogized that visionary planning was in foreclosure. The Museum of Modern Art has taken the opposite tack, engaging contemporary architects in civic thought experiments. Uneven Growth presents six such tactical urbanisms for megacities ranging from Hong Kong and New York to Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.

How to handle the imminent influx of Hong Kong immigrants? Easy enough, according to the team of Hong Kong and New York architects assigned to the project. Just make more islands. For instance, theres the Island of Surplus, an unstable archipelago of abandoned detritus shaped by years of accretion that resembles prehistoric vestiges of an ignorant civilization. And then theres the Island of the Self, a dark and wet labyrinth built inside a supertanker, offering a secretive feast of drugs, adventure and sex.

In case the names dont make it obvious, the architects assert that each of their eight new islands draws on one of Hong Kongs characteristics, exaggerating it to an absurd extent. Underlying their elegant visual presentation is a satirical prankishness reminiscent of the robotic Walking City designed by Archigram in the 1960s.

Yet the humor that animates this vision of Hong Kong also delimits it. Except in the most inspired of visions, satire is inherently reactionary. (On the other hand, schemes offered in utter sincerity such as Le Corbusiers towering 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris usually serve as inadvertent reminders of why architects should never be given absolute power.) Historically the most compelling urban visionaries have been those like Lebbeus Woods willing to risk ambiguity.

Reclaiming Growth. 2014. Perspective of Mumbai with ultra-light growth and supragrowth. Courtesy Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab.

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Hong Kong's Next Exclusive Hideout Or The Worst Joke In Real Estate? See Six Future East Asian Islands At This New ...