The public has been misled about the Central reclamation, and the Town Planning Board should take another look at the plans before the face of the city is changed for the worse, the Society for Protection of the Harbour says.
Rather than the open space and parkland promised by the government, the society says there will be more than 11 hectares of shopping malls and offices, and a brand-new network of roads cutting across the entire area, much the same as elsewhere on the harbour.
It also insists that the government's plans may not even be legal, in light of a landmark court ruling in January that reinterpreted the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance as requiring proof of 'overriding public need'.
The Town Planning Board has the ability to ask the executive council to refer a plan back to it for reconsideration.
As part of its campaign, the society has created images it says show the size of the planned works. Society chairwoman Christine Loh Kung-wai said the images - contained in a four-page lift-out in today's South China Morning Post - were created using specifications from the Central (Extension) Outline Zoning Plan.
'We want people to understand this is how [the government] is going to use this land,' Ms Loh said. 'The public thinks that the reclaimed areas will be used for parks and a promenade when, in fact, most of it will be used by the government for land sales to develop offices and shopping malls, with little relationship to the people's enjoyment of the harbour. Indeed, the entire face of Central from Statute Square to beyond City Hall will be dominated by what the government calls a groundscraper, which is really a skyscraper laid horizontally.'
The plan shows the groundscraper is longer than the 88-storey Two IFC is tall, and can be up to four storeys high.