ENG-1993 — Page 28

A RARE ALCHEMY

through a random series of arbitrary decisions, as to where to put what. It was a development that took its cue from the early and in the prevailing force of circumstances, at the time necessarily very expedient rush to simply cope with the astonishing flood of refugees pouring into Hong Kong in the late forties and early fifties.

Those were the years that saw the growth of the first high-rise or perhaps, by today's standards, medium-rise - residential blocks, cheek by jowl with industrial areas, where a few square feet of tiered bunk space would suffice for sleeping, so long as one had elbow room to cook and a window from which to thrust the poles of washing.

I well remember how parties of overseas visitors would react-with dismay to see whole families crowded into such confines. They had to be educated to the hard facts about Hong Kong's survival; principally, the fact that this was the only way in which our administration could provide housing for the thousands of refugees who had fled China to seek freedom and opportunity, for which they considered such basic resettlement was a small price to pay.

That standards of housing have since improved beyond all recognition, that greater affluence has encouraged a taste for more spatial and better quality design, that old resettlement blocks have either disappeared or been extensively renovated, does not alter the underlying priority of proximity. Which, in turn, has dictated a wholly new architectural principle of development on the vertical rather than the horizontal plane, transforming Hong Kong into a multi-storeyed megalopolis where all amenities shops, schools, recreational parks and transportation systems are layered for instant and

convenient access.

However, containment within the traditional urban areas around the harbour could not be achieved indefinitely. There was a limit to the miracles of hillside engineering, on the steepest of seemingly impossible slopes, that even Hong Kong could not surpass.

And when that limit was reached, one of the greatest tasks the government had to face, back in the late sixties and early seventies, was the challenge of persuading the populace to move to the New Territories. So far from work? So removed from the whole premise of existence?

But it had to be. It had to come. The twin cities of Victoria and Kowloon were straining at the seams. The overspill into Kwun Tong, on the north side of Kowloon Bay, and westwards to Tsuen Wan, had only temporarily allayed the demands for more industrial zones, for more and better housing.

At that time, the last rice fields were dwindling in the backwaters of the New Territories, and agricultural land had been steadily taken over by market gardens. Fishing ports and market towns like Tai Po, Fanling, Sheung Shui and Yuen Long had survived pretty well unchanged for a century or more. I remember that Castle Peak Bay, where the tower blocks of Tuen Mun are now arrayed on reclaimed land, was largely given over to boatyards building those majestic sailing junks which have also long since departed from Hong Kong waters.

One could appreciate why the city dwellers of Hong Kong and Kowloon would look askance at the rusticity of this seldom visited hinterland.

To entice them there, the new satellite towns would have to be the very models of ingenuity, benefiting from the lessons learned in those older urban conurbations. And above all, it was apparent that the chief objective must be proximity of everyone to everything.

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