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WITH MY TONGUE IN MY CHEEK
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by Professor W.C. Gregory, B. Arch., A.R.I.B.A.
NEW SLUMS FOR OLD
THE Planning Ordinance of Hong
Kong, it must be admitted, can
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only be applied with effect to new areas of development, but it does not take more than a cursory sur- vey of the urban areas of Victoria and Kowloon a stroll through Western District and Yau Ma Ti suffices to realise the great and urgent need for legislation to enable the re-development of large areas of these cities to be planned, and it follows, that as it is not possible to plan large areas of cities without planning the whole. legislation must provide for comprehensive planning.
The most important aspect of re- development is slum clearance and re-housing, and so far, in Hong Kong. it has only been possible to tackle this in respect of hill-side squatters, who have no rights to the land they occupy but whose condi- tions may be regarded as being rather better than those unfortunate people living in overcrowded, highly dilapidated tenements, such as in Hollywood Road and Canton Road. where the removal of one brick is liable to cause a collapse.
From the point of view of view
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of health standards, it is probably preferable to live in a squatter hut than in an old tenement and from the point of view of safety there can be little in it. Admittedly a fire in a squatter area appears to cause more material damage considering the numbers of people involved the loss of life is again prob- ably less than in a tenement fire. The only difference from the fire hazard point of view is that in a tenement fire, the Fire Brigade is generally able at least to reach the scene of the fire, which is not the case in a typical squatter area. Even so, it verges on the incredible that there has not been a major conflagra- tion in the older urban parts of the Colony.
THE HONG KONG & FAR EAST BUILDER
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The general title of this series of articles "With My Tongue In My Cheek" — is intended to convey a degree of provocation in the views given and the arguments advanced on the matters under discussion.
However, there are times when situations come to mind which have no need of this form of treatment to press home a point and it is proposed to discuss one such matter in this article.
While this must be taken as a de- served tribute to the Hong Kong Fire Services Department. it is too much to expect that. however efficient they are or may become, that they will always be able to keep a fire situation under control, particularly as overcrowding increases and, with it, increases in the illegal storage of dangerous goods and the illegal prac- tice of hazardous operations become inevitable.
An assumption has just been made that overcrowding is increasing This statement requires some ampli- fication. It implies that despite the tremendous housing effort, supply is continuously running behind de- mand. It is now an accepted fact that even in the well-developed coun- tries, as for instance Great Britain. where population increases are not so significant as in, say. the coun- tries of South-East Asia, and where housing has been carried out on an unprecedented scale, the situation is getting gradually worse.
In Hong Kong, it seems that at present the annual housing produc- tion merely satisfies the natural in- crease in population and has no im- pression on the continual run-down of existing housing (it should be re- membered that natural population growth is increasing year by year -- snowballing). But this is no worse, and in fact very much better, than
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many other countries, both neigh- bouring and distant.
It is not the intention of this pa- per to explore the reasons for this; they are comparatively obvious and closely bound to world-wide econo- mics, but the point should be made, in passing, that the situation is ag gravated by the techniques and methods employed in housing. and for that matter in all building, which have not advanced to the extents of developments in other fields.
This pessimistic outlook must not be permitted to act as a deterrent to continuing with the housing pro- gramme of planned re-development of the urban areas, which would na- turally include slum clearance.
It may be argued that with private enterprise providing new housing at something like 10,000 dwellings a year (the figure for 1959-60) a good deal of urban renewal is being ac hieved, particularly as a great pro- portion of this occurs in the re- building of tenement property in urban areas.
In no way can this renewal be re- garded as planned re-development and it is only necessary to examine briefly the manner in which it oc- curs, to see that not only is a great opportunity being lost, but that what is being done is merely replacing old slums with potentially new slums.
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