Officials must change the way they look at urban planning
I would like to add a comment to Lee Ho-yin's letter ('We can keep our old streets and still redevelop', September 3) asking that the government, politicians and pressure groups look more carefully into the conservation of all existing urban streets.
True, but it is fundamental change in official thinking about urban planning, heritage conservation and the way we live that is needed.
Over the past 10 years there has been, for example, a planned strategy to increase the concentration of development throughout Kowloon and along Hong Kong Island's harbourfront.
This strategy has hardly been explained nor debated by the public. Who decided that high-rise buildings on the new West Kowloon reclamation area and in the older areas of Tsim Sha Tsui, Hung Hom and Tai Kok Tsui should block views and harbourside air flow? Certainly not the public.
In contrast, the Urban Renewal Authority's planned six-year project to build four large high-rise buildings and a three-level shopping podium on the Graham Street market has seen much media coverage and public debate. Information is a powerful tool. There has consequently been universal and deafening condemnation of a development that will overwhelm this much-loved, practical and historic street market, but - and the public realises this - do nothing to improve the day-to-day life of the average person living in this part of Hong Kong Island.
Government, statutory and big-business structures dealing with urban planning decision-making bamboozle the public and allow little opportunity for outside or clear-headed ideas to be entertained. Being unable to be involved in these decisions is potentially and seriously divisive for a public with heightened expectations of all its decision-makers.
We may have 60 per cent of our population living in public housing, but having no equity in that housing should not - as it has been seen for so long by officials - be equated with having no interest in 'the way we live'. The public's plummeting approval ratings for the government are and will continue to be proof of this.
John Batten, Sheung Wan
