ENG-1987 — Page 24

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HONG KONG BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

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The Hong Kong Government's physical planning has come to be centred on land formation and use and transport systems. This is because these are the areas of scarcity in Hong Kong's circumstances, the expansion of which often requires heavy investment and long lead times. Planning for their expansion has therefore to be at the centre of the government's development strategy.

As has already been explained, useable land is scarce in Hong Kong because of the topography. Flat land suitable for development is scarce and much of what there is has been produced artificially, by cutting into hillsides and using the material to fill in the seabed. This is why, in Hong Kong, land development is often called 'land production'. It also explains the paradox of why, in a territory where 'land' (which means land suitable for development) is so scarce, as much as 40 per cent of its area has been turned into country parks.

The shortage of developable land, in relation to the size of the population and the activities of the economy, explains also why-transport systems rate such high priority. When 3.5 million increasingly affluent people are concentrated in a belt surrounding the harbour, and another two million in six new towns in the New Territories, travel within them and between them is bound to be heavy.

When costly motor roads have to be provided to meet this demand, much of them on overhead structures or tunnelling through hillsides or under the harbour, and costly railway systems also, it is small wonder that transport planning has loomed so large in Hong Kong for more than 20 years. And among costly transport systems we should also include port and airport development, the roads leading into them and the provision of land for backup areas and for cargo and passenger handling facilities.

Land development planning and transport planning were brought more closely together by the first Comprehensive Transport Study finished in 1976. This showed that land-use patterns and transport demands were intimately linked, to the extent of being two sides of the same coin. The link was carried further in the preparation of the Territorial Develop- ment Strategy, the initial results of which were completed in 1984. This used a complicated Land Use/Transport Optimisation Process to assess detailed development options pro- duced in studies on five sub-regions and to come up with a preferred territory-wide solution. The preferred strategy places greater emphasis on reclamations around the harbour in the next stage of development as compared with further dispersed developments in the New Territories.

The strategy is now being further refined to take into account the need for urban renewal in some of the older and more overcrowded and dilapidated parts of the metropolitan area. And it is also having to be meshed in with plans for the additional expansion of port facilities and, possibly also, for the building of a replacement airport. The necessary transport systems roads, railways, tunnels and bridges to serve the new developments and to link them to other parts of the territory and on into China - are also having to be considered.

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A second Comprehensive Transport Study is currently being undertaken to update the previous study and bring it forward into the new century, and the result of this, as well, will have to be related to the other studies in drawing up a revised and expanded Territorial Development Strategy for the nineties and on into the new century.

The Growing Inter-relationship with China

The new dimension is not just the growing demands resulting from the expansion of Hong Kong's own economy, substantial as they are. It arises rather from the exceptional

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