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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
of Science and Technology, that we could describe this progress as well-nigh fantastic. Such a rapid rate of change brings in its train corresponding changes in other fields of human life and perhaps, most of all, in the sociological field.
One of the most obvious effects of this increasing technological progress has been the replacement of workers, more and more, by machines capable of doing completely automatically, the most complex processes. One result of this has been to increase the depersonalization of people and the resultant tendency to treat individual workers no longer as fully-developed individual personalities but merely as units, mere digits in an elaborate pattern of industry and commerce. This sociological phenomenon is most marked in highly industrialized urban communities. In such communities it is not uncommon for this depersonalizing influence to be felt beyond the confines of the workshop or office; it has reached even into schools and other social units.
Our highly industrialized community here has not escaped this increasing, depersonalizing influence and I propose to devote some time here to-day to a consideration of some of the effects of this influence and some of the remedies, which I submit need to be vigorously applied if we are to avoid the baneful effects felt elsewhere from this phenomenon.
I shall deal primarily with one aspect namely Personal Safety. Time was not so very long ago in this community when reasonable precautions were taken, as a matter of course, to ensure that none of our daily commercial pursuits would in any way cause injury to other citizens. In the frenzied industrial and real-estate development of the last six or seven years that awareness of the need to think of others and their personal safety has been largely lost sight of.
A cursory excursion through any part of our urban area will bring to light a variety of hazards to life and limb, alarming in their number and potential danger. A benign Providence has spared us an appalling holocaust in our multi-storey residential blocks, but to continue to tolerate or ignore the tremendous fire hazards existing in these buildings, is to tempt that Providence too much. These fire hazards have one common origin, a disregard for the lives of others coupled with a high regard for personal convenience. Greed is a poor foundation on which to build an urban civilization with a high standard of living; since it unbalances our life by concentrating our attention on our own personal gain to the exclusion of all other considerations that do not directly contribute to that gain. The danger and the difficulty lies in the fact that over a long period such greed tends to boomerang and may cost us dear in the event of a tragedy. The mounting toll of road accidents is another manifestation of this spirit of depersonalization.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
Road users rushing about their own business without a thought for others; contractors and their staffs contenting themselves with a minimum compliance with safety regulations; business activities encroaching on footpaths, wholesale disposal of rubbish and litter in light wells of multi-storey buildings, all point to a disregard for the other person and his safety.
It is the mark of a civilized people that a citizen can go about his lawful business, content in the knowledge that he will not be endangered or molested. We cannot honestly say that this is the case in present-day Hong Kong. I have not touched on the many other hazards to safety of the lives of our citizens; they are well known to you. Drug trafficking, triad activities, the public transport problem, the "Ah Fie" problem all combine to make life difficult and unsafe for our citizens.
I have chosen this subject for my speech to-day not because I feel that one and all of these hazards can be removed overnight, but rather because I feel that a very much more alive awareness is needed on the one hand by all in authority and on the other by the ordinary people of our community, that we have a mutual obligation to promote one another's safety. I feel that if the situation is presented to our people they will respond as they have done in the past to remedy it. But our action must be whole-hearted, co-ordinated and continuous to be effective. In effect I am asking that we here in the Urban Council concern ourselves effectively with the problems relating to all aspects of safety. The newly tried system of being available to members of the public each week, gives us the means to increase our knowledge of these hazards and to keep in closer touch with the ordinary people. I am asking too that each department of Government sees to it that, as far as it comes within the scope of that department, the life of no citizen will be endangered by acceptance of minimal compliance with safety procedure, by neglect to see that standards are kept up to requirements, by letting off offenders lightly, by not effecting salutary legislation before lives are lost or bodies maimed. In short, I am asking that we do not allow this canker of depersonalization this disregard for our fellow-citizens, to take root in our body politic.
May I now be permitted to deal, more in detail, with just one of these hazards to life and limb, namely MULTI-STORIED BUILDINGS, I refer to the many multi-storied buildings in which self-contained flats are sold to various people, or let out to tenants who are only responsible for their own flats and for nothing else outside of them. These multi-storied buildings are scattered about, around both Hong Kong Island and on the Peninsula, and frequent complaints have been expressed through the correspondence columns of the Press against the insanitary conditions existing in the corridors of every floor of such buildings, which have in effect become storied slums, without the
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