and if anyone else has it it is idleness'. Still more widely reported in recent weeks was the balancing comment made by HRH Prince PHILIP in America that leisure was like money-one could not have too much of it. In their various ways these remarks highlight one of the principal problems of urban societies of the present day. Not all perhaps of the authorities involved in redevelopment or new construction recognize their direct, however partial, responsibility for the kind of society that will eventually be found to be living in their creations. It is the duty of social workers to bring their influence to bear on the planners and to foster the conception that a sense of community, a sense of social responsibility and happy, healthy, constructive and rewarding use of the growing amount of leisure that modern times are making available, not only all go together but are intimately tied up with architecture, town layouts, transport and traffic, municipal services and the provision of educational and health facilities. Part of their efforts to fulfil that duty is the subject of this chapter.
11 The post-war growth of Hong Kong's population and economy make a lack of social cohesion inevitable. Hong Kong is neither a settle- ment with a history of 124 years nor an outpost of the world's most ancient continuous and uniform culture but a heterogeneous amalgam of people, whose corporate memory cannot go back longer than twenty years without recourse to imagination. The population is now nearly four million people; there were only 650,000 in 1945, and nearly half the present population are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who came in during the fifties. Seventy per cent live in severely cramped housing conditions around the fringes of the harbour, and half of these were not born in Hong Kong. Between 1954 and 1965 the Government resettlement programme had rehoused more than eight hundred and fifteen thousand citizens in densely compressed multi-storey 'new towns' and in a few resettlement cottage areas; this figure means almost one in five of the whole population. Families rehoused in this way may have little feeling of neighbourliness towards those next door and so far very little leisure. Such conditions present formidable difficulties.
12 However the Youth Welfare Section (a title which is likely soon to become more realistically-Community and Group Work Division) has made an increasingly widely recognized contribution, through its community and social centres set up in resettlement estates and new towns, to bring the inhabitants together, first attracting them to the centres, which provide welfare services and leisure activities, and then stimulating through these centres the development of a community spirit.
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