Jake's View | Trees just the start for axe swinging needed at West Kowloon arts hub

The urban forest rivalling New York's Central Park that was to have graced the West Kowloon Cultural District is reduced to a series of lawns under a cost-cutting design unveiled yesterday.

Money devoted to the park has been halved to HK$1 billion and green coverage of the site reduced from the originally proposed 80 per cent to 60 per cent.

It's time for a proper use of the axe on this bloated wastrel project. Let's not just cut the trees. Let's cut the whole thing. We need to start from the beginning again.

Here is how it stands. A glorious green lung of a park with a number of both performance and arts display venues, which we were to have for HK$25 billion, will now be a much-delayed concrete desert costing probably HK$100 billion with some of its major features unlikely ever to be built.

Meanwhile, the eternally fractious arts community is squabbling as much as it ever has about what to do with the space and getting no further ahead than it was years ago. There is a lesson here - one should never let artists (or journalists) try to do things. Emote, scribble and talk, yes. But do?