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Planning, Land and Infrastructure
• Exploring new sources of developable land and space: mainly by conducting studies to explore new modes or sources of providing developable land and space, including brownfield sites, reclamation outside the harbour, and development of caverns and underground space.
In the short to medium term, the most immediate and effective way to augment land supply is to make more optimal use of developed areas in urban areas and new towns, and land in the vicinity of infrastructure, through appropriately increasing the development intensity of developable land, changing land use, converting reserved sites, and facilitating and expediting development where planning terms permit.
In the medium to long term, the government is taking forward land supply projects including the Kwu Tung North and Fanling North New Development Areas (NDAs), Tung Chung New Town Extension, Hung Shui Kiu NDA and Yuen Long South development. These involve releasing large tracts of brownfield sites and deserted agricultural land in the rural New Territories as well as reclamation in environmentally less sensitive waters.
The government is also exploring reclamation outside the harbour, cavern and underground development, and Hong Kong 2030+ proposes that the East Lantau Metropolis and New Territories North provide capacity for sustainable development and identify ways of creating space for growth.
Land Use Strategy
As a prudent and visionary long-term strategy, Hong Kong 2030+ advocates a capacity-creating approach to generate both development and environmental capacity. Land with high. ecological, landscape and/or historical value will be preserved, while degraded areas, the fringes of built-up areas and the two Strategic Growth Areas could be considered for development. Five broad measures are proposed: optimisation, such as upzoning and rezoning sites for development; swopping, such as freeing up land by relocating land uses not requiring prime locations and releasing land with low conservation value and public enjoyment value for other uses; innovation, such as exploring the idea of rock caverns; creation, such as reclaiming waters with low ecological and environmental value outside the harbour; and life-cycle planning, such as prudent planning of beneficial after-use of quarries, landfill sites and other temporary premises.
Land Use Reviews
Through reviews of land use, the Planning Department has identified some 150 potential housing sites, most of which may be made available for development in the five years from 2014-15 to 2018-19 to provide more than 210,000 flats, of which over 70 per cent can be public housing, subject to amendments to their respective statutory plans. Separately, for the various initiatives to increase land supply announced in the 2013 Policy Address, 42 sites were zoned or being rezoned for residential use in the short to medium term by end-2013, capable of providing about 40,000 flats in total, with over 60 per cent for public housing. As at end-2016, 91 out of these 190-odd potential housing sites had been zoned or rezoned for housing and were estimated to yield about 107,200 flats, comprising about 62,000 public housing and 45,200 private housing flats. For another 21 sites, statutory rezoning procedures had been initiated to
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