ENG-1963 — Page 60

36

REVIEW

on steep hillsides or on land not yet ripe for permanent de- velopment.

Residential densities

Physical conditions and limited funds for the construction of roads and other services, combined with the strong economic pull of the port, have led to the intense development of the relatively small portion of the Colony immediately surrounding the harbour. The factors which control this intensity of development are there- fore of great significance. The Buildings Ordinance has, during the present century, been the main controlling force over building volumes in the urban area. It has been revised on several occasions, the latest and most important revision being eight years ago. The 1955 Ordinance allowed much increased building volumes. At the same time it became the practice to sell flats individually, there being nothing in the law to prohibit division of ownership in a horizontal plane nor one piece of land being owned by a multi- plicity of co-owners. The combination of these two factors has led to the construction of vast multi-storey multi-user buildings, the ownership of which is divided between many individuals— occasionally several hundred. By the end of 1962 no less than 3,968 buildings were sub-divided into two or more shares, the total number of shares involved being 65,455. Seventeen buildings were sub-divided into more than 300 shares each. From this development, the pressure of population and the rising standard of living has sprung the great increase in land values experienced in the last 10 years.

Residential densities of land use in Hong Kong are some of the highest in the world. It is not unusual to find 22 or more persons living in one floor of a tenement building with a frontage of 16 feet and a depth of 50 feet, giving a gross floor area of roughly 36 square feet a person. With four storey buildings (three over a shop) and 30 tenements to the acre this gives a residential density of 2,000 persons an acre or more. When a block of these buildings is replaced by a structure covering the same ground area, 20 storeys high (including two floors of shops) and occupied at a similar but rather less intensity, the population density rises to- wards 10,000 persons an acre. Such alarmingly high densities have not yet been recorded, but until the new Building (Planning)

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