THE Government is too casual in designating land as a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA), which can freeze land use and block development, the new president of the Hongkong Institute of Architects said yesterday.
Mr Dennis Lau Wing-kwong said the Planning Department seemed to be designating land as a CDA more often than in the past and the development of certain areas had been obstructed.
Mr Lau, who took up the presidency this month, said there were about 80 CDAs in the territory and land use had been frozen for no good reason.
He said it was understandable that the designation was applied to environmentally sensitive areas such as the Peak, the waterfront and districts without adequate infrastructural services. This allowed proposed developments to be considered in the light of design merit and ability to cope with an area's constraints.
''But such a planning tool is too widely used and almost all development sites of a sizeable area have been designated even before the drafting of the outline zoning plans for these sites,'' Mr Lau said.
Without outline zoning plans, the blueprints for various types of land use, developers and owners would not know what purpose the Government had in mind for those areas.
The Government refused to talk to individual land owners unless small owners formed a conglomerate.