ENG-1978 — Page 19

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NEW TOWNS

maintaining a rural balance, ensuring that part of the New Territories will continue to be used for farming to help supply some of Hong Kong's daily market needs. Large expanses have been designated as country parks, where people can enjoy the tran- quillity and beauty of unspoilt countryside. Urban growth is limited to designated areas in which government housing estates and private residential projects, landscaped to blend into the surroundings, are rapidly going ahead.

While the key development is taking place in the three new towns, the old market towns of Tai Po, Fanling-Sheung Shui-Shek Wu Hui, Yuen Long and several other rural townships have not been forgotten. They are being expanded, modernised and provided with additional amenities to meet present-day needs.

The New Territories building programme means that significant numbers of people from the cramped conurbations of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon are exchanging their former homes - in older resettlement blocks, tenements and squatter areas – for contemporary flats in public housing estates. For many this means a complete change of lifestyle. However Hong Kong people have demonstrated repeatedly during the territory's 137 years of history their ability to adjust to the new and unexpected. The new town scheme has several objectives: it will help solve the housing problem; attract industry to new areas; and alleviate Hong Kong's general problems of conges- tion by diffusing the pressures of urban development. Its implementation is being tackled with the same vigour and enterprise that have been features of Hong Kong's remarkable growth.

Scale and Speed

The government's large-scale housing plan, started in 1973, aims at providing by the mid-1980s enough permanent self-contained homes, with good amenities and in a reasonable environment, for every eligible family at present unsatisfactorily housed in Hong Kong. Because most of the usable land has already been developed on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon, the high-rise blocks needed to carry out this plan have to be located in the New Territories.

Nowhere has such a programme proceeded on so great a scale or with such speed. Rarely, too, have the associated problems been so challenging. In most countries, a new town will be planned to accommodate from 50,000 to 100,000 people and phases will be scheduled over a period of 30 years or more. But many Hong Kong people need better homes in a shorter time and the new towns, which are scheduled for completion in less than a decade, are to house two million people.

The detailed planning of the new towns has required an appreciation of the needs of the people, vision and imagination. Hong Kong's growth has always been restricted by its rugged landscape and the territory has been forced to reclaim areas from the sea for its progress. In the new towns this pattern of development is continuing, with large areas reclaimed for site formation. Multi-storey housing blocks are inevitable because of space limitations but they are of a far better design than earlier housing estates. With Hong Kong's rising standard of living and people's increased expecta- tions, the flats are designed to fulfil the requirements of a more demanding generation. Density is about 2,470 people to one hectare compared with up to 7,000 people to the hectare in the older estates in the urban areas.