A COMPLETELY NEW PORT
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conurbation. 'Over the last twenty years,' he said, 'various things – particularly a massive influx of people, the growth of large-scale manufacturing and, not least, the con- tainerisation of cargoes - have been steadily pushing development to the west, along the harbour. This area, Tsuen Wan, is a good example of the results.
'Here we have the factory town of Tsuen Wan itself, transformed from a fishing village. There's public housing forging ahead in it and around it. And now, alongside, a container port has got going at Kwai Chung.'
Lastly, he unrolled a map labelled 'Colony Outline Plan', remarking that since it was a confidential document, 'we'll only take a quick look at it -- just long enough to show you that we're studying development options much further westward.' And he indicated marks on the map, representing possible projects of the future, on Lantau and elsewhere.
'Make no mistake,' he concluded, rolling up the map. 'The thrust to the west will continue.'
This exposition, recollected today, poses some interesting questions. For example, if the westward movement and its continuation were so evident then, is it not an exaggeration to regard the PADS design as embodying a 'completely new port'? Will it not be just part of a continuum, an extension of existing facilities?
The short answer is no. Container port developments up to around 1997 – meaning the new terminals at Stonecutters Island and Tsing Yi - will certainly extend the Kwai Chung port. But the post-1997 projects for Lantau are different. They will amount to what a senior town planner, measuring his words carefully, has termed a ‘quantum leap'. The leap will be spatial and temporal: into a large, roughly basin-shaped area of sea and sur- rounding land capable of manifold development far into the 21st century.
Another question that may come to mind is: if the advantages of large-scale de- velopments in the west were so apparent in 1973, why was a PADS-like scheme not launched and adopted much earlier?
Out of many convincing explanations, there is space here to select just one. The simplest of answers is that while Hong Kong's collective energies often seem boundless, its resources are not. During the 1970s and 1980s its planning and construction efforts were centred on two prodigious undertakings: the construction of the Mass Transit Railway and the development in the New Territories of new towns which now provide homes for more than two million people.
The railway and the public housing programmes in the new towns were mega-projects with a common aim: to make daily life easier and more worthwhile for people who had lived and laboured arduously for too long. These were schemes that could not wait. During the intensive periods of construction - five years for the MTR, more than ten in the case of the New Territories Development Programme - they claimed, and were given, top priority.
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The two undertakings can be likened respectively - in scale, cost and duration - to building a new airport and developing a new port. The MTR had a target date for completion of its Initial System which it met ahead of schedule in 1979. Similarly there is a target date, 1997, for completing the first-stage projects of the Chek Lap Kok airport.
The parallel between the new towns and the new port is also close. The New Territories Development Programme was phased, with adjustments from time to time, over an initial fifteen-year period. The port works envisaged under PADS will be phased over a similar period, with variable timing.
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