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A State of IntenCity
Since 1841, Hong Kong has operated effectively as a city-state, first under British colonial rule, and more recently as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) within China. Accepting this semi-autonomous status in the world table of nations, its territory of 1,104 square kilometres ranks 184th by area between Martinique and Sao Tome & Pincipe, 98th by population (6.9 million in 2004) between Honduras and El Salvador, a surprising eighth by the size of its trading economy (Ingham, 2007), and a staggering third on the international ladder of connectivity, ahead of cities such as Tokyo and Paris (Johnson et al., 2008). On the latter point, Chep Lak Kok Airport, which is one of the world’s largest and busiest, plays an important role. Most important, however, is Hong Kong’s position as an economic powerhouse, and a major logistics and knowledge centre – a member of an elite club of international finance centres, being the world’s third largest after New York and London (Ingham, 2007). The latter, LONDINIVM, is ancient by comparison; and even ‘New World’ New York, or New Amsterdam as it was known originally in 1625, was founded two centuries before Hong Kong, and is therefore middle aged.
In other words, Hong Kong has barely left its youth on a city age scale. It was an infant prodigy at the turn of the twentieth century. The city is still not 170 years old, having grown from a small isolated military-cum-trading post on the north side of an inhospitable island just 2 km off the coast of China where evidence suggests more than six millennia of settlement. It is a central place in a vast Asian region that consists of both mainland and islands, and has been dominated by Chinese culture for many centuries. While it is recognized that the area of Hong Kong SAR has a long pre-colonial history, this will feature only occasionally here as our focus is on urban growth and form. Under most of the period of British colonial rule, it grew massively in population but modestly in area. Only once during those 156 years did it lose significant population, and that was during World War II under Japanese occupation. Immigrants have been mainly Chinese, and the place’s rapid growth was in part due to its ‘pull’ as a centre of trade. But it also had much to do with the ‘push’ from various political upheavals in the region that saw hundreds of thousands of refugees from China and elsewhere pour into the Colony, at times in flood-like proportions. The first major civil unrest in China that propelled people to Hong Kong was soon after foundation: that was associated with the 1850–1861 Tai Ping Rebellion. Within less than twenty years, there were over 100,000 people in Hong Kong, and over a quarter of a million before the end of the nineteenth century. This growth compares with or outstrips that experienced by several cities of Victorian Britain during their most frantic years of industrialization. Thus, the city was quick to become sufficiently populous to ensure a measure of self-sustaining growth. But this growth was relatively minor compared to that experienced from the middle of the twentieth century: few places in the whole history of cities can match Hong Kong’s expansion during the years following Japanese occupation and in the years surrounding China’s communist revolution: from 1945 to 1951, the population grew by 210 per cent, from 0.65 million to 2.02 million, after which the city continued to grow by between one-half and one million people per five year period until the mid-1960s (Lo, 1992). Only in the early years of the twenty-first century do we see this scale of growth matched in the massive rural to urban migration now underway in China.
At the time of British settlement, Hong Kong island, from which the metropolis grew, was famously referred to as a ‘barren rock’: it had an area of less than 80 km2 whose landform rose steeply from the surrounding sea, and was devoid of any resource to speak of. Even when the Colony ‘jumped’ Victoria Harbour to occupy a fragment of the Asian mainland, with the acquisition of Kowloon Peninsula (adding a mere 9 km2 in 1861), and further extended to embrace the New Territories in 1898, the territory remained small – just 1,070 km2 in all – mostly mountain but also with extensive swamp. It is an understatement to say that opportunities for city building were constrained.
It was against this unusual physical and demographic backcloth, that land became the Hong Kong government’s main instrument for shaping the Colony’s economy and urban form. And it is one of the ironies of Hong Kong’s success that, although wedded to capitalist free-market development, the British crown government held a socialist-like (without the ideology) hold on ownership and control of land, to gain its main revenue from the sale of development rights for subsequently leased land. From within four years of settlement, this was the modus operandi, and remains so to this day. No other government in the modern world, communist or capitalist, has been so consistent, effective or comprehensive with such a policy over such a long period of time.
Further, within this framework there has always been a government-controlled programme of land construction through reclamation – from sea and swamp. From the early years, lots that were leased to developers included watery ‘marine lots’ – filled and developed by private interests within the parameters of government-determined survey. Today surfaces reclaimed from the sea alone represent no less than 6 per cent of Hong Kong’s total land area: between 1887 and 2006, some 67 km2 of sea were converted into land (Hong Kong geographic data). If the modest areas of reclamation from the earlier years of settlement are added, the total approximates to the entire island area of the original Colony. Approximately one-third of Kowloon (which is increasingly the heart of Hong Kong) is on reclaimed ground. And of all developed land in Hong Kong, over 35 per cent has been reclaimed from the sea (Jiao et al., 2005)
In short, the government has not only controlled the sale of land development rights and leased the land, but also initiated and effectively built (or at least determined the ‘building’ of) much of the ground on which development has actually occurred: in the process, it has built the equivalent of another Hong Kong Island but arguably more useful in its flatness. Hong Kong is like Holland in the reclamation game, although with the latter it was a matter of extending an already flat country, while in Hong Kong it is a case of adding a skirt to a body of hills. Perhaps a better analogy is as a micro-Japan. The latter consists of several large mountainous islands, leaving only 30 per cent of the nation sufficiently flat to readily accommodate urban building: the result is extensive reclamation, particularly for city growth.
To reclamation, we can add another major layer of government-initiated building in the form of public housing. Although the government’s entry into this arena was comparatively late and prompted by necessity, it has been huge. In the 1950s, following some catastrophic fires in squatter settlements, a start was made in this kind of urban development. It entered reluctantly but very quickly became an effective and massive supplier of public housing – with much of it on land constructed through reclamation. It was not until 1954 that a public housing authority was set up in Hong Kong: yet within just over a decade (1965), 1 million or nearly one-third of residents were living on public housing estates. By 1981, this had risen to 2 million or almost two-fifths of the Colony’s population.
From such circumstances, we would expect dense development to have emerged but the sheer concentration of people and built form in Hong Kong still astonishes most observers. Land construction and modification, the sale of development rights, land leasing and public housing have been combined unwaveringly into policies of deliberate density. Again neither the pursuit of public housing nor density was strongly ideological but as will be seen in later sections, mostly a pragmatic response to circumstances.
Important here is that Hong Kong has evolved into the quintessential high-density small-footprint city – with a population of 7 million on an urban land area of just 120 km2: this gives a concentration of people approaching 600 per hectare – without doubt, at the top of the city-wide average population density table in the world, and rivalled only by Mumbai and Dhaka. Further, densities of 1,000 or more people are commonplace in Hong Kong, and can rise to approximately four times that figure per hectare on particular blocks or lots, for instance in Mong Kok and in some new towns. Thirty-plus storey housing and commercial towers are a ubiquitous sight across the metropolis, with multi-level shopping a general experience. Gross residential densities measure in four figure whole numbers in several places – a phenomenon hardly known at even small spot points in most of the urbanized world. In fact, no matter where you may be standing in built Hong Kong, whether it is the Central District or a peripheral new town, you are likely to be in or between the shadow of towers or other high buildings, yet remain only a few minutes walk to water or mountain (and forest) respectively, most probably both.
It is, writes Peter Rowe, this scale of Hong Kong that ‘sets (it)apart from most, if not all, other living environments and offers the prospect of a different way of life’. Further, he adds, these characteristics ‘begin to define a difference in the kind of living environment, rather than simply a difference in degree’ (Rowe, 2005). In recent discussions of urban intensity, it is not surprising to find a play upon the word with it morphing to intenCity in more than one arena. It is a valiant attempt to capture the combination of several urban qualities – of concentration, density, complexity and verticality,
where the interplay between the quartet brings a level of intensity that is somehow much more than the sum of the parts. While more will be said of this later, it is a fact of urbanism that no city has deserved the term so much and so consistently as Hong Kong.
This was highlighted by material comparing the two cities shown in a recent exhibition at New York’s Skyscraper Museum: Vertical Cities: Hong Kong/New York. Using 400 feet or 122 m as a height criterion, it showed Hong Kong to be well ahead of New York in the tall building league with 558 skyscrapers compared to New York’s 360. It saw both cities as having evolved as colonial ports on small islands aside outstanding natural harbours but recognized that Hong Kong ‘surpasses New York in the number of high-rises, hyper-density habitation and efficient mass transit’ (The Skyscraper Museum, undated). However, it also acknowledged some very important differences: most of Hong Kong (Victoria, Kowloon and its extensions, and the New Territory new towns) all stand consistently at densities that approximate to what is a central density in New York: and, as noted above, most of Hong Kong exists in walkable proximity to mountain and/or sea. From our morphological and ecological perspectives, these are crucial differences.
Prior to the Vertical Cities show, the same museum mounted another exhibition dedicated to New York’s emergence as a skyscraper city in the early twentieth century, which included the high-rise city visions of several New York architects of the time: these were not just skyscraper cities but multi-level cities in the sense of having a publicly accessible domain rising through several levels. The assertion is that Hong Kong, became the arena in which some of those visions were later played out; and where relevant, we shall make appropriate flashbacks to these, for it can be argued that it is in Hong Kong that many visions from elsewhere have found their realization.
The final point in this introductory section is that Hong Kong’s functioning as a dense city depends on most people making almost all their journeys on public transport or, as is typical of Hong Kong, on publicly regulated private vehicles. The transport system offers a diversity of complementary services that, together, are second to none. It includes train, ‘tube’, subway or underground iron, bus, mini bus, several types of ferry boat, taxi, tram, bicycles and more which give choice in speed and price, plus considerable convenience in changing from one to another. The result is that 90 per cent of journeys are made on vehicles providing public passenger services. In a city in which gross densities of 500 per hectare plus are commonplace, and the unit length of road per registered vehicle is the shortest in the world, public transport is a necessity. In 2008, there were 575,000 vehicles and 2,080 km of road, thus 282 vehicles for every kilometre. The circumstances should not, however, blind us to the achievement, for Hong Kong’s public transport is exceptional by any standard – so much so, that urban transport and energy use analyst, Jeff Kenworthy, was able to proclaim Hong Kong’s ‘remarkably successful transit system and very low car usage’ as a model to the world in his ‘Model Cities: Asia’ paper (Kenworthy, 2001). Amongst several reported statistics, he cited a HK per capita increase in car use over the decade 1981–1991 of just 146 km, compared to 2,584 for Los Angeles. He noted that half of Hong Kong’s residents lived within 500 m of a Mass Transit Rail station, and that 70 per cent of users of this intensively used system walked to and from their origin and destination stations when making their trips. Only 3 per cent of passengers used some other form of transport at both ends of their train rides to connect to other places
To think of Hong Kong’s ‘public transport’ only in terms of conventional vehicles is too limiting and should rightly be extended to include ‘public movement infrastructure services’, for lifts, escalators and other people movers play crucial roles in the compendium of interdependent systems that keep this city mobile. Their collective capacity, complementarity and convenience is impressive; and each has its own, sometimes very special, setting, configuration and dimensions that will also receive our attention.
Many authors have contributed to our understanding of Hong Kong’s form and growth by turning their expert attentions to particular events or conditions: the extreme physical geography, land development as economic policy, reclamation, the territory’s refugee history and demography, its West-East hybrid culture, the late but massive public housing programme, variety in public transport, the evolution of specific districts and more. For instance, Owen and Shaw’s graphic portrayal of Hong Kong’s underlying geology and geomorphology, Edward Pryor’s charting of Hong Kong’s earlier housing years, Peter Leeds’s account of developments in public transport, Frank Leeming’s excellent early seventies’ street studies, Nuala Rooney’s fascinating exploration of Hong Kong people’s high-density spatial sensibilities, Alan Smart’s challenging commentary on the rise of Hong Kong’s housing policy and McDonogh and Wong’s highly readable cultural overview of Hong Kong as a colonial and global centre are just a few examples (Owen and Shore, 2007; Pryor, 1972 and 1983; Leeds, 1998; Leeming, 1977; Rooney, 2003; Smart, 2006; McDonogh and Wong, 2005). Such works have provided us with invaluable contextual sources. Our focus is overlapping but different, namely the physical urban form at various scales of resolution from the network of old centres and new towns through to building and spatial detail: thus it includes urban structure; natural and constructed ground; local street, block and subdivisional layouts; building and spatial typologies; infrastructure; etc and their relationships. Whi...
