Can Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s former airport, take off as the city’s second business district?
- Slow progress in infrastructure development could stall the ambitious project
- Kai Tak will take 10-20 years to mature, experts say
The viability of repurposing Hong Kong’s former airport at Kai Tak into the city’s second business district by the 2020s is likely to fade further into the distant future, as the construction of basic amenities and infrastructure is delayed by a lengthy consultation process.
A monorail network with 12 stations linking the former airport’s runway precinct with neighbouring Kwun Tong and Kowloon Bay remains on paper, as the commencement of construction planned for 2018 is stuck midway in a three-stage public consultation process that has lasted a decade.
“The vision is good”, but the “execution of the plan might have been mishandled”, said He Huahan, a district councillor who some times advises Hong Kong’s government on public facilities in the Kai Tak South area.
“Related amenities and facilities are still not in place, including the Sha Tin-Central link, while the consultation for the construction of the monorail has taken more than 10 years.”
If Kai Tak’s past was a showcase of Hong Kong’s can-do spirit and entrepreneurship, its present reflects some of the problems that ail the city, rendering its future in doubt.
Kai Tak, which served Hong Kong for more than seven decades until 1998 as the city’s sole civilian airport, got its name from a failed real estate project by two local businessmen, Ho Kai and Au Tak, in the 1920s, who had sought to build mansions on a plot of reclaimed land.