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Planning the future of Hong Kong
Does Hong Kong need urban regeneration? And if so, what form should it take? Alex Frew McMillan reports
Hong Kong’s built-future was the topic of an interesting conference held at the W Hotel in West Kowloon in mid-July and organised by the Financial Times. Speakers discussed the form Hong Kong’s revitalisation is taking, and the alternatives available.
It seems that the Hong Kong government’s approach to inner-city regeneration is to identify an area such as Wedding Card Street in Wanchai that is a little run down, and get developers to step in and build luxury residential apartment blocks or upscale office space. Wedding Card Street will become a luxury shopping mall.
But some of the people attending the conference came at the question another way. Does an area that looks run down but is thriving need revitalisation at all? Aren’t these places already very vital? If the problem is that the buildings are a little shabby, perhaps incentives or laws should be put in place to encourage or enforce owners to revamp them.
It’s already clear from the ‘ghettoization’ of new towns, such as Tin Shui Wai that urban regeneration in Hong Kong should not involve razing all the old buildings, erecting luxury accommodation for the upper classes, and moving all the working-class people an hour’s commute from where they work.
Tin Shui Wai New Town, planned in the late 1980s and Hong Kong’s newest big town, has been dubbed the ‘City of Misery’ thanks to the serious social problems its residents have developed. Read the newspaper, and it’s not uncommon to hear stories of mothers throwing children off high-rise balconies, parents stabbing their children in their own homes, and husband-and-wife couples who duel to the death.
“The oldest parts of the city don’t have urban decay,” Chris Law, the director of The Oval Partnership, said at the conference. “Tung Chung, Tin Shui Wai and Tseung Kwan O [all new towns] have the highest delinquency rates.”
Law, an architect by training, who founded The Oval Partnership to work on sustainable lifestyle projects in Asia, says his company has put together a survey of what the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) of Hong Kong has done over the last few years. Of nine projects that the URA took on, “virtually in every single one, virtually every function of these older districts suffers irreparable damage,” he says. “Each time, you get a little bit of physical environment improvement and a lot of luxury housing, housing that people on the median income of Hong Kong cannot afford.”
Law notes that while Hong Kong is one of the richest cities in Asia, it is also one where the gap between wealthy and poor is the widest. The median income is still HK$8,000 to HK$9,000 per month, with a median family income of HK$15,000 per month.
Immigrants used to move into the centre of the city and live in the oldest parts of town. They walked to work. But if you are earning HK$4,000 per month, you can’t spend HK$2,500 each month to commute from Tin Shui Wai to Hong Kong Island and expect to stay afloat.
Old neighbourhoods in Hong Kong are some of the most egalitarian, Law points out – rich and poor all live together. Great examples are Wanchai, North Point, Kennedy Town and Tsim Sha Tsui. “Here,” says Law, “you have extremely wealthy people eating the same bowl of noodles as somebody who is cleaning the toilets in the business centre.”
Law believes it is a mistake that 95 percent of what the URA focuses on is urban clearance. “The original solution that we have is wrong,” he says. “If we want to deal with dilapidation, we need different policies. And if we had five times the funding, we could solve most of our development problems.”
Unfortunately, in Hong Kong, a government that the people didn’t elect cooperates with developers with which we can’t compete. It is beyond most of us to start up a property development company, but an increase in the number of small developers would probably create more property options. A fully democratic and elected government would at least assure that if Hongkongers are unhappy with the policies of the URA, they could replace the people who direct it.
It might be better if the government was not so closely involved in urban regeneration, and just let the free market get on with it. Incorporated owners’ committees, the ability to build or renovate your own place, and a larger number of small-scale developments could solve many of the problems.
“Do we actually need the URA in Hong Kong?” Law asked. “Is it actually causing more problems, by raising expectations of people wanting to sell [their property] at four times the normal price to the URA, and suppressing investment in the area? Is the URA causing urban plight rather than helping to cure it?”
Law Chi-kwong, an associate professor in the department of Social Work and Social Administration at Hong Kong University, noted that Singapore, Seoul and London are all trying to get people to move from the suburbs back into the centre of the city. “Moving population, especially the working class, away from the city centre doesn’t work,” he says. “The misery of Tin Shui Wai is having one-and-a-half to two hours of travel time per day, and dollars of transportation costs – it’s not a viable solution.”
Mixed development appears to be the way forward, with residential, office and retail space all in the same building. Controversially, some of the people at the conference suggested that rich and poor people should live in the same buildings, with upper floors at a higher cost, and perhaps subsidised housing for working-class people on the lower floors. Upper and lower class would become literal terms, your bank balance demonstrated by the number you press in the elevator.
Although it is assumed, in free-market Hong Kong, that the economic or commercial benefit of construction and development projects should reign supreme, Professor Law questioned that premise. “Should we reverse it, or should the social, environmental and financial [impact] be on the same footing?” he asks. “When we’re doing an environmental-impact study, or a social-impact study, we consider what mitigation measures can be used to mitigate negative impact on the environmental or social aspects. Should we [instead] have a mitigation measure for negative financial impact?”
Christine Loh, the CEO of the public-policy think tank Civic Exchange, says activists have lost many battles in their dealings with the government and with developers in Hong Kong. But she believes that such issues are increasingly prominent in public discussion – in the media and at conferences, for instance – is a great step forward.
“This is the sign of active debate, people wanting to discuss the future of the city,” Loh says. “If Hong Kong spends more time discussing what kind of city people want to live in, the outcome will be good.”
Creating entities like the URA is a strange way of solving the city’s problems, Loh notes. The government hands over its responsibilities by subcontracting to a public-private partnership, which has government representation but is technically autonomous. The public-private partnership then in turn partners with a private developer.
Chris Law traces the thinking that identifies city centres as the “source of the problem” back to the 1970s, when there were inner-city riots in many industrial cities in the Western world. “We were thinking those are the cancer, let’s cut it out, let’s cure it,” Law says. “[But] 35 years on, we realise a lot of these inner cities are very safe. There were virtually no SARS cases in older districts, and the crime rates are not higher than in other parts of Hong Kong. Now we all realise we have a lot of problems in our new towns.”
The interventionist policies of the government, such as heavily restricting the supply of new land, are not helping the economy, either. “The Hong Kong government is actually stopping the supply of land to make sure property price doesn’t collapse,” says Law. “All this intervention doesn’t help the economy. But it does allow a small number of developers and bureaucrats to make more money and profit.”
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