ENG-1960 — Page 196

LAND AND HOUSING

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for this centre and sales of land have recently taken place in accordance with the plan.

The Board is at present charged with the preparation of draft plans for the Sha Tin Valley, the Tsim Sha Tsui locality, the new Kwai Chung - Tsuen Wan industrial township and the central district of Hong Kong Island. The Tsuen Wan - Kwai Chung scheme envisages the development of an area covering almost 5 square miles for a population of some 600,000 people.

Urban Buildings. Private expenditure on building amounted to $273,545,397 an increase over the preceding year of 11.8%. The value of new non-residential building construction in relation to the total rose from one-fifth in 1959 to two-fifths in 1960: this was due in part to the completion of several large office blocks in Victoria (including the 19-storey headquarters of one of the principal banks), three large hotels in Tsim Sha Tsui, and a generating station for the Island's electricity undertaking.

Construction. The traditional reinforced concrete frame, with floors and roofs cast on site, continues to be the basis of almost every building of consequence in the Colony. A few tall buildings use structural steel frames; load bearing masonry is now very uncommon. Buildings are put up with great rapidity and costs are not high by world standards: so long as this remains true, modern structural techniques such as prestressing or precasting are unlikely to be adopted in Hong Kong. New materials, however, are in- creasingly used in higher-class buildings, especially for finishes.

Planning. Housing in the urban areas falls into two clearly defined types Chinese and European. Chinese type tenements consist of a large living space with kitchen and lavatory. The large space is then subdivided by wooden partitions about 6′ 6′′ high it may contain one family, or several, living in separate cubicles, and using the kitchen and lavatory in common. A large block may contain two or three hundred tenements on anything up to 16 floors: lifts are normally provided where there are seven storeys or more. New European type housing, with few exceptions, is usually built in large blocks of flats provided with lifts.

Public buildings, offices and factories follow western practice in planning with comparatively minor local variations. As an example of the fast rate of building, the plans of a 5-storey 42