Where’s the Master Plan?

There’s something rotten in the state of Hong Kong. Really rotten. Right now, the city has three large pieces of prime, undeveloped harborfront land that represent a rare and remarkable opportunity for our urban planners. But over the past few years, we’ve had canopies collapse, parking lots on prime city-center sites, runways masquerading as driving ranges, a disappearing harbor, and a skyline that threatens to close in on us. Why?

“There is something very wrong with our planning vision. There is no vision,” says Justyna Karakiewicz, an assistant professor in architecture at the University of Hong Kong. “Hong Kong is the only true compact city in the world. We suffer from a tremendous land shortage, but the way we waste land is staggering.” Just look at the massive reclamation in West Kowloon, she says, which was reclaimed before a real concept had been finalized and which still doesn’t have a workable plan.

As well as the stalemate in West Kowloon, there’s the uproar over Tamar, and the dilemma about what to do with Kai Tak, all major parcels of land stuck in a quagmire of public debate. The problem is that the government does not seem to have a concrete, long-term master plan for how the city should look and function in the future. Instead, the Housing Planning and Lands Bureau (HPLB) deputy director Ava Ng says there is a “regularly updated territorial development strategy for Hong Kong, which provides, in a broad and strategic manner, a land use-transport environment framework to guide future development and major infrastructure provision. The review outlined a strategy to guide development up to 2011.”

This strategy is currently being reviewed again under “Hong Kong 2030: Planning Vision and Strategy.” It’s supposed to translate Hong Kong’s vision as “Asia’s World City” into a long-term physical development plan. It may sound like a master plan, but a visit to its website reveals little in the way of anything concrete. And no one seems very happy with it. “It is only a very broad-brush approach,” says legislator Alan Leong of the Civic Party. “There’s nothing substantial in it. Some of these planners have wanted to create a vision beyond 2030, but their hands are tied. Some planners may face grave consequences if they speak out against their bosses.”

“It’s actually unfinished,” says Albert Lai, chairman of the Hong Kong People’s Council for Sustainable Development. “It’s not quite a vision as such. Officially, we don’t have a vision yet as to what the city should be. The closest thing to a vision is Tung Chee-hwa’s policy speech in 2000. He basically embraced the concept of sustainable development. He didn’t quite elaborate on what exactly that is. I’m not sure he fully grasped the concept.”

Meanwhile, the reality is that we are suffering from piecemeal development that is often over-crowded and badly designed, and a worrying trend towards what Lai calls “walled-harbor phenomenon” – ugly tower blocks crowding the waterline. Such development has prompted legislator Choy So-yuk, who has attended planning sessions, to say: “There’s vision in a microscopic manner, but I don’t see a lot of macroscopic planning.”

With planning issues hogging headlines on an almost daily basis, it is time that changed. “The whole planning system is lagging far behind public expectations,” Leong says. “There needs to be a sea change in the minds of the people calling the shots in Hong Kong. They have to genuinely address bottom-up town planning. If they don’t, there will come a time that the government may always find itself on the defensive.”