Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

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Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

Posted inArchitecture,Art and Design,Asia Pacific,Environment,Heritage and Preservation,History,Public Space,Society and Cultureby Christopher DeWolf

This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition ofMuse magazine.

The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.

Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that ittook a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years.Weve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long, she said, looking up at a rusted balconyon this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. But we couldnt convince the government to save the

whole street.

That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the streetwith its single row oftong lausbuilt just before and after World War IIas the perfect backdrop for their weepydrama about a shoemakers family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at theBerlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting thenarrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in HongKong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group ofarchitects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of thebuildings on Wing Lee Street.

Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development,Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site.For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement wasonly a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entireapproach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that issensitive to the environment, that enhances the citys streetlife and sense of community and thatrespects Hong Kongs history and heritage. Right now, developers can do whatever they want,and theyre facilitated by the government. We need planning controls, she said.
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Hong Kong is being furiously remade by major redevelopment projects in nearly every part oftown. The Urban Renewal Authority (URA), a quasi-public organization that facilitatesredevelopment by purchasing multiple properties to sell to developers, has plans for more than50 areas throughout Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The largest project, which will redevelopKwun Tongs town centre, will cost more than $20 billion and displace 4,829 people and 523

shops. Meanwhile, a recent policy change by the government has lowered the percentage of flatsprivate developers need to buy in an old building before they can force the remaining owners tosell. That has led to a spate of private redevelopments throughout the citys ageingneighbourhoods. Finally, plans are being hatched to develop vast tracks of empty land like theformer Kai Tak Airporta huge area that could come to define the future landscape of HongKong.

The question now is what path will Hong Kongs development take? Few people seem satisfiedwith the status quo. Heritage issues, sparked by the demolition of Wedding Card Street and theCentral Star Ferry pier, have moved to the forefront of public concern. So have worries about theenvironment. Revelations of off-market sales at URA-backed developments have stirred anger

against the authority, whose mandate is now under review by the government. Developers havetaken flak for misleading buyers about the size of their flats and for loading new buildings withexpensive clubhouses that are rarely open.

Heritage conservation is linked to good urban planning, which is linked to good trafficplanning, pedestrian flows, good parks and appropriate buildings that allow airflow andsunlight, said John Batten, an art critic and urban design activist who works closely with Law.Good urban design, he said, requires a holistic approach, one that considers society, theenvironment, culture and business in equal measure. For most of Hong Kongs history, however,urban growth has been driven largely by profit. With growing public concern over the citysheritage, culture and quality of life, that might be about to change.

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Three years ago, Lee Chi-man, a computer animator, began matching old photos of Hong Kongwith new ones taken in the same location. He now has more than 700 of these then-and-nowcompilations on the photo-sharing website Flickr. Each one is a vivid demonstration of just how

much Hong Kong has changed over the past century. Shantytowns have disappeared, buildingshave grown taller, the city has evidently become cleaner and more prosperous.

But many of the changes leave a nagging sense that something has been lost. Inone typicalcompilation, Lee contrasts a late-1960s shot of Possession Street in Sheung Wan with one takenat the same location last April. In the old photo, the street is filled with pedestrians; shops spillout into the street and a hawker stall is visible in the near distance. Laundry hangs out to dry onbalconies and the sidewalks are shaded by arcades. In the new shot, the street has been widened
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and the pedestrians largely replaced by cars. Grey metal railings separate the sidewalks from thestreet. The balconies are gone; bay windows and air conditioners take their place. The arcadeshave disappeared, too, leaving the sidewalks exposed to the sun and rain. On one side of thestreet, a blank wall has taken the place of first-floor windows.

When I first met him last summer in a Mongkok caf, Lee explained that he started puttingtogether the images as a hobby, but the more he saw of how Hong Kong has changed, the moreupset he became. Im 36 years old and the city where I grew up is no longer there, he said. Idont understand why we are trading our old streetlife for new development. He told me abouthow, when he was growing up in Hung Hom, he used to accompany his father to the ferry pier tofish and ride his bicycle. Now the water is gone, reclaimed for two upscale housing estates thatsit behind high walls.

Hong Kongs urban development, like that of any city, has always been driven by two forces:population growth and government policy. Until the 1960s, Hong Kong was a city of low-rise,tile-roofed shophouses and tenements. The crush of refugees that arrived after 1949, when the

Communists won the civil war in mainland China, led to terrible overcrowding. Families builtramshackle houses on hillsides, where they were vulnerable to fire and landslides. Others livedon balconies, in hallways and on rooftops. In the early 1950s, the Housing Authority was set upto build housing for the poor, and the Housing Society was given the task of building housing forthe middle-class. Building regulations were changed to increase density. Despite these efforts,the 1961 population census found that 68 percent of Hong Kongs population was inadequatelyhoused, either in squatter settlements, rooftop shanties or in cubicles.

Rich streetlife compensated to some extent for the eras deplorable living conditions. The streetswere marketplaces, living rooms and playgrounds all at once. In 1974, the Royal Asiatic Societysent photographers to document the neighbourhoods west of Pottinger Street. Their photos, now

collected in the book A Sense of Place: Hong Kong West of Pottinger Street, form a portrait ofthe city through its streets: children playing in small alleyways, see lai examining eggs at thestreet market, schoolchildren lining up to buy congee from an itinerant hawker.

Things began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when large property development companiesemerged, with a preference for buildings that were bigger and tallerand thus more lucrativethan anything Hong Kong had seen. Government-led urban renewal was introduced in 1988with the creation of the Land Development Corporation, an organization that would eventuallybecome the Urban Renewal Authority. Almost all of the old districts of Hong Kong Island, withthe exception of the central business district, were slated for renewal. The whole point was tolook for urban development opportunities, not to improve living conditions, said HendrikTieben, an assistant professor of architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Tieben is one of several academics who have studied the transformation of old Hong Kongneighbourhoods as part of an urban design workshop for graduate students. He is critical of theurban renewal process. Urban renewal projects have been planned for Sai Ying Pun since themid-1990s, only a few of which have materialized. The fact that for over 15 years there was anurban renewal scheme announced that never materialized contributed to the identity of the areabeing dissolved, he said. Buildings were left to decay as owners waited to be bought out for


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redevelopment. The plan has always been for the upgrade of the neighbourhood, but not for theresidentsthey were expected to move out.

The few urban renewal projects that did move ahead featured designs that put them at odds withthe surrounding area. Sitting in his university office, Tieben showed me photos of one

development that faces the street with concrete walls. Even though it includes public open space,he said, its cloistered design makes it intimidating and unappealing. Almost no one uses it. Theproblem isnt new development in and of itself, he adds many new buildings blend inperfectly with the streetits with the whole urban renewal process ofassembling largeparcels of land to be redeveloped by a single developer.

Tiebens colleague, Woo Pui-leng, points to the URAs latest Sai Ying Pun project, Island Crest,as an example of where urban renewal goes wrong. The bigger the building, the less human-scaled it becomes, she said. Within the level of seven stories you can see human facialexpressions. Three to four stories up, you have a direct engagement with whats happeningbelow. There are eyes on the street. The lowest apartments at Island Crest are several stories

above street level. Even worse, the First Street side of the development consists of massive blankwalls, air conditioning vents and service entrances. Maybe its quite pleasant if you live on the50th floor, if you have that kind of money, but when you go to Sai Ying Pun now it feels liketheres a big hole, said Woo. Its quite awful to walk to the street there.

Island Crests relationship to the street is more than an aesthetic concern. If the streets becomeunpleasant, people will walk less, which increases their reliance on pollution-generating forms oftransport like cars and buses. The sheer bulk of buildings like Island Crest block airflow, saidTieben, which traps pollution and increases the ambient temperature of the surrounding areas,increasing their reliance on air conditioning. This kind of vicious cycle is one reason whyroadside pollution in Hong Kong has become noticeably worse in recent years. Statistics from

the Environmental Protection Department show that pollution levels were high for 80 percentof the time in the first quarter of 2010 and very high or severe for nearly 14 percent of thetime. In the first quarter of 2000, by contrast, pollution levels were high for 51 percent of thetime and very high for just over 1 percent. There were no days when roadside pollution wasclassified as severe.

Many of the critics I spoke to told me that big-ticket redevelopment also hurts Hong Kongssocial and economic environment. In its current form, urban renewal is a kind of government-sponsored gentrification, replacing cheap shop space and apartments with luxury housing andhigh-rent retail. Instead of being given a flat in the new development, residents are eithercompensated with cash or moved to public housing, usually in the New Territories. Theyprobably couldnt afford to stay even if they wanted to: the going rate for an apartment in IslandCrestwhich advertises itself as being in Island West rather than Sai Ying Pun is almost$15,000 per square foot. The block it replaced, by contrast, was made up of flats in a largevariety of sizes and prices, not to mention shops that included ethnic grocery stores andtraditional rice merchants.

In response to questions, Island Crests developer, Kerry Properties, sent me a statement byemail: The stunning and modern exterior design () makes it an iconic development along the


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waterfront in Island West. Its green public open space on Second Street not only beautifies theentire environment and creates a city garden for the neighbourhood, but also widens the distancebetween Island Crest and its surrounding buildings. There is also a covered atrium connectingFirst Street and Second Street, which provides extra convenience for the public.

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Just how much can be lost becomes clear as I wandered through Central with Katty Law, passingthrough some of the URAs redevelopment areas. At the corner of Gage Street and GrahamStreet, in the heart of the Central street market, we stopped next to a seafood stall. Behind us,

shrimp squirmed inside a styrofoam container. Law pointed up at a six-storey building. Thiswill be replaced by a two-storey wet market, she said. What worries us is who will manage it.If its a private developer, the rents might be too high. And what about during the construction?The dust and noise will be so much the shrimp will jump right out of their box!

She turned around and points at three pre-war shophouses. Those are the buildings that will bepreserved for a so-called old shop street, she said with a grimace. We continued along GageStreet, past vegetable stalls, butcher shops and a green hawker booth that stands vacant. Acrossthe street is an old seven-storey tong lau that has been renovated and turned into a servicedapartment; it will be excluded from the redevelopment, Law said. We pass a piece of graffiti by

local artists Graphic Airlines. (Dont kill the market) it read.

This is familiar territory for Law, the daughter of a Hollywood Road antiques dealer. She grewup on Caine Road in the 1970s and has spent her entire life in Central. I lost my school toproperty developers, she said, recalling the original location of the Sacred Heart CanossianSchool. It was a beautiful school. Ive witnessed this kind of development all my life. I canphysically feel itthe pile-driving goes on and on and on. I ask her how Central has changedover the years. She told me how the tong laus and small apartment buildings of her youth gaveway to huge towers. Its like a screen coming up. The streets became like canyons. The new
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buildings dont even have shops at the bottom, just the entrances to car parks, and if there areshops being built, theyre usually quite expensive. The old neighbourhood feel has disappeared.

Turning onto Hollywood Road, we passed a row of Chinese banyans growing out of an old stonewall next to the former Central Married Police Quarters. We had to fight to save these, she

said. Until a few years ago, the government wanted to sell the old police quarters to privatedevelopers, and the trees would have given way to garage entrance. When Law found out, shetook her two children and joined the campaign to save the trees. When the campaign succeeded,Law turned her attention to the rest of the site. That marked her transition from housewife toactivist.

Its tiring, but we cant get too stressed, if only to preserve our sanity, she said. In recentyears, weve seen the blossoming of groups like ours. Wherever the URA goes, we have seen therise of concern groups. The government is serving the developers more than they are serving theneeds of the people. That makes people upset. The entire urban renewal process is gearedtowards profit-raising. Its a bulldozer form of development that doesnt allow things to change

in a gradual or organic manner.

In recent months, the URA has been on the defence against critics of its practices. Although ittakes on money-losing projects at the governments behest, most of its initiatives are quitelucrative, and it ensures a healthy profit for the property developers it works with. Therelationship between the URA and developers has often been controversial. Last year, it wasrevealed that New World Development had sold several flats in the Masterpiece, a URA projectin Tsim Sha Tsui, to business associates, before they were made available to the public. Whenthe flats came on the market, they fetched more than $30,000 per square foot. Many weresnapped up by investors looking to cash in on a resurgent property market. Newspaper storiesdescribe planeloads of mainland tourists given free visits to Hong Kong in the hopes that they

would buy property in the development.

The URA declined my requests to interview its director of planning and design, Michael Ma.When I asked a spokesman about how much the URA considers local businesses andcommunities when it plans a development project, he responded by email: It is always theintention of the URA to maintain and enhance local characteristics in its urban renewal projectsas far as practicable, he wrote. So far, however, there are no examples of a URA project inwhich existing residents or shopowners have stayed. One development often cited by critics isthe Woo Cheong Pawn Shop, which was included in a URA redevelopment site in Wan Chai.While the century-old building housing the pawn shop was preserved, it is now home to anupscale bar and restaurant called the Pawn. Woo Cheong was forced to move down the street,where it still operates today.

Because urban renewal is profit-driven, said Law, it encourages the development of up-marketproperties that drive up rents. It basically removes the ability for small businesses to survive,she said. Take away a street market and you take away the livelihood of everyone involved in themarket. The butcher with a stake in a business and a role in the community becomes anemployee at Wellcome. The government should rethink its strategy to protect the cultural


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diversity of Hong Kong. Right now, it seems to be going in the direction of becoming verymonotonous.

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The grassroots urbanism of street markets, hawkers and neighbourhood streetlife has long beenat odds with Hong Kongs planning policies. Hawkers were tolerated by the government formore than 100 years after the British occupied Hong Kong, but in the 1950s and 1960s, the surgeof refugees from mainland China led to a huge increase in the number of hawkers, from anestimated 13,000 to more than 70,000. The government stopped issuing new hawker licences in

1970. Since then, the number of hawkers has dwindled to 7,048. Last year, the Food andEnvironmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) issued 61 new licences for ice-cream vendors, andit also began auctioning off a small number of vacant hawker stalls. So far, demand for the newlicences has far outstripped their availability132 people applied for the new ice cream licences.

Street traders may be considered a nuisance by the authorities but hawking has often been thefirst step up Hong Kongs economic ladder. This spring, walking past an urban renewal site inMongkok, I bought a bottle of water from woman named Mrs. Tang, who sells newspapers,magazines, cigarettes and drinks at the entrance of an old shophouse. She said she had been therefor 20 years. In exchange for being able to store her goods under the buildings staircase sheshowed me a government-issued Staircase Occupation Permit she cleans the buildings

entrance and keeps an eye on everyone who enters or leaves.

I asked her what she would do when the building was redeveloped. She told me that the URAhad kept her in the dark about compensation, but she gestured towards a list of letters andnumbers written on a yellowed piece of paper taped to the side ofa shelf. Those are taxinumbers, she said, explaining that she had saved up enough money to buy a taxi and rent it outto a driver. She used the rental income to buy more taxis. Now she owns 25. I wanted my kidsto have some money, she said. After the renewal I wont bother to open a new stall.


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Things arent as good for other hawkers. The Wongs have been selling lightbulbs and otherelectrical appliances from a stall on Aberdeen Street in Sheung Wan for more than 50 years.When I met them last winter, Mrs. Wong complained about the traffic on Aberdeen, which hasbecome the main route for cars heading down the hill from Mid-Levels. After a block oftenements across the street was torn down to make way for a playground and a new hotel,

business dropped, and Mrs. Wong said there are days when they make no more than a fewhundred dollars.

The future of dai pai dongs is also uncertain. Concerned about hygiene, the government stoppedissuing dai pai dong licences in 1956, and it began buying back licences in 1983. Only 28licensed dai pai dongs remain today, nearly all of them in Central and Sham Shui Po. Unsanitaryor not, the restaurants remain extremely popular, and several dai pai dongs attract long queues atlunch and dinnertimes. Last year, recognizing their role in the street culture that makes HongKong unique, the government announced plans to renovate the 10 remaining restaurants inCentral and to make it easier for their owners to transfer their licences.

But no plans have been made for the 14 dai pai dongs in Sham Shui Po, which do not attract asmany tourists as those in Central. According to the FEHD, the Sham Shui Po district councilobjected to any plans to preserve the areas dai pai dongs, citing complaints from residents overnoise and filth.

In May, on a stickily hot night, I visited Yiu Tung Street, home to five of Sham Shui Posremaining dai pai dongs. On one side of the street is an untouched block of 1950s-era tong lausthat is slated for redevelopment. The street had a festival atmosphere, with lights strung along thesidewalk and taxis double-parked next to plastic crates of soda bottles. Big tables of diners satoutside, sharing dishes and bottles of beer.

I sat down at one of the restaurants, So Kei, and ordered a bowl of pork chop noodles and alemon tea, listening to a group of men nearby swear profusely as they drank. I asked therestaurants owner, Wong Chan-hung, what would happen when the block across the street wastorn down. Its all going. Well have to move to a cooked food centre, he said. I was surprisedI hadnt heard anything about this. The government hasnt told us anything yet, but its onlya matter of time, he said. He looked resigned. We just replaced our booth two years ago.Theres nothing we can do about it. Its better on the street. Theres too many restrictions in themarket. But if they tell us to go, we have no choice.

A couple of tables over, a grey-haired taxi driver named Yeung sat down and ordered a bottle ofSan Miguel. He poured himself a glass and said hed been coming to So Kei for 10 years. I askedhim why he was so loyal. Its outside! he exclaimed. It has a certain style, you know? Youcan relax. He lit a cigarette. It would be terrible without dai pai dongs. The best thing would beto have them everywhere, in Central, Kowloon, all over the place.

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Not far from Yiu Tung Street is the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, where local design labeland lifestyle store G.O.D. has opened the Street Culture Gallery, a kind of museum of HongKong kitsch and pop culture paraphernalia. G.O.D.s founder, Douglas Young, has always beenfascinated by the distinct look of Hong Kongs cityscape and it shows in his designs: underwearprinted with the image of Yau Ma Tei tenements, fridge magnets that look like old tin mailboxes,aprons that pay homage to plumbers and building contractors graffiti advertising their services.His argument is that Hong Kongs street culture things as lowly as green hawker stalls andfresh-cooked gai daan tsaiis what gives the city its sense of place and identity.

That message is especially clear in Youngs new sculptures of theKowloon Walled City, a

highrise squatter settlement that was torn down in 1993. One installation, called the WestKowloon Walled City, was displayed at the Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanismlast winter. It sat in a weedy field with the glossy fortress of the Kowloon Station developmenta massive shopping mall, apartment towers and the new International Commerce Centrerising behind it.

The walled city was a symbol of resistance against outside forces, Young wrote to me on hisBlackberry as he prepared an installation for the Hong Kong International Art Fair at the end ofMay. Today, we should also develop stalwart resistance against the wholesale homogenizingforces of global commercialism. In becoming more modern, we should not be simply becomingmore Western. I wish to see Hong Kongs grassroots architecture play a larger part in the

composition of our urban landscape.

When I asked him what exactly that grassroots architecture was, he explained: Its not thearchitect that is the final designer of the buildings, he is just a matrix provider. Its the tenants,through their additions, that are the ultimate designers. And that the process is continuing like aliving organism. In other words, if Hong Kongs streets and buildings are its skeleton, and itspeople are the organs that give it life, its the hawker stalls, the fruit shops spilling into the street,the clotheslines and shop signs that are the flesh that make the city what it is.
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Rosly Mok and Vanessa Chan are two young designers that also take inspiration from HongKongs street culture. For the past several months, they have been working on a project abouthousehold furniture that people leave in the street, at bus stops and in other places where nopublic seating is available. The people who design the street ignore the need for seating areas,so the neighbourhood people put things they dont need to good use by putting it in the street,

explained Mok as we sat on office chairs and stools set around an old mahjong table in ManHing Lane, in Central. By day, the table and chairs are used by old men who play cards duringthe day; by night, they are used by drinkers spilling out from a nearby bar.

The problem with Hong Kongs urban planners and landscape designers, said Chan, is that theyjust work in their office without actually studying how people use the city. Another problem isthat street furniture is standardized and installed without considering the needs of thecommunity. When Chan and Mok studied the discarded furniture, they found that that peoplepreferred it to public benches, even when they were available.

The best course of action, they said, is to let the city evolve naturally. In traditional urban

fabric, the configuration of space is developed gradually by people through time, said Mok. Itallows the neighbourhood [people] to express the way they want the space to be.

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At the moment, grassroots urbanism exists in opposition to the way Hong Kong designs andmanages its urban spaces.Angela Tam, a writer familiar with the property industry, describesHong Kongs architects, planners and government officials as being obsessed with control.Katty Law and John Batten told me that the URA and most government departments are aloofand hard to deal with. Its impossible to have any sort of face-to-face dialogue, said Law.

Even Hong Kongs urban planners are critical of the way things work. One planner, who is notauthorized to speak publicly and thus asked not to be named, says that the Planning Department,
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like other branches of the government, is burdened by bureaucratic structure. Planning shouldinvolve people, but in my experience, it doesnt work like that, said the planner. Instead ofmeeting the public, planning officials hire consultants to solicit public opinion. Theyre prettysloppy. Theres no creativity and no understanding of how space will be used or how people willinteract with it. The biggest concerns are with cost and maintenance.

But things seem to be changing. Ian Brownlee, an urban planner who has worked as a consultantfor both the Urban Renewal Authority and community activists like the Central and WesternConcern Group, has witnessed a major shift in attitude towards urban development. Pre-handover, people were moving out, there wasnt a lot of confidence in what was going on. Nowpeople realize theyregoing to stay here forever. They want to make Hong Kong a better place,he said.

Five years ago, the Town Planning Ordinance was amended to allow any member of the publicto make an application to change a planning proposal. It goes around to all of the departments,everyone has a copy, and they have to respond to it, said Brownlee. That process has allowed

activists like Katty Law to convince the government to change its plans for sites like the CentralMarried Police Quarters, which was originally slated to be torn down for three 40-storey towersand a shopping mall. Now it will be preserved and converted into an arts centre.

There is also more official emphasis on rehabilitation over redevelopment. Last year, the URAlaunched the Building Bright program, which helps the owners of old buildings renovate theirproperties. It received far more applications than expected. Meanwhile, dozens of old tong lauflats around Central have been bought and renovated by private investors who see potential intheirhigh ceilings, large windows and vintage charm. Before, everyone assumed that oldbuildings would just be knocked down, said Brownlee. Now that isnt the case. You can do upan old flat for $300,000 or $400,000. Its much cheaper to refurbish a building than to knock it

down and redevelop it.

The powers that be also seem to be taking note of alternative approaches to urban development.This years Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism wasunderfunded and under-promoted,especially compared to itspartner event in Shenzhen, but it was also imaginative and innovative.With very little money, architects Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei transformed a vacant lot inWest Kowloon into a showcase for ideas about sustainable urban development. Several topgovernment officials, including Carrie Lam and Henry Tang, visited the show, as did manydistrict councillors.

Hong Kong is famous for having this other type of city that grows from within, saidSchuldenfrei when I visited the Wong Chuk Hang studio he shares with Yiu. In a street market,everyone is engaged in design. (One of the biennales installations took this notion to greatlengths by taking a stall from the Graham Street market and putting it on display.) But HongKong is still ruled by a top-down, hierarchical approach to design that stifles grassrootscreativity. The dominant culture, said Yiu, doesnt see the value of everyday space, even ifpeople talk with fondness about dai pai dongs and street markets.
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As we spoke, Schuldenfrei grew quiet. He got up, opened the window and stared out at the viewof Aberdeen Harbour. Boats twinkled in the water as the frame of a new housing estate loomedon the shores of Ap Lei Chau. Suddenly returning to the table, he said, So much of this citylooks like it was designed by so few people. Its beyond formulaic. Every housing estate lookssimilar because a small handful of developers control the housing market. The heart of Hong

Kongs dilemma, said Schuldenfrei, is its land development policy.

So what is the way out? More architectural competitions would help, said Yiu, and so wouldmore dialogue with the community. More people need to realize the benefits of incrementalurban change and small-scale development. You could call it dai pai dong-ism, she said with agrin.

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Back in Wing Lee Street, a few days after seeing Law, groups of schoolchildren wanderedaround, staring up at the tong laus. After Carrie Lams announcement that the street would besaved, some of the areas residents erected banners urging the URA to take responsibility anddeal with the street in a way that would benefit its tenants and landlords. At the moment, eventhough Wing Lee Street has been spared demolition, the surrounding streets will still beredeveloped.

Turning onto Shing Wong Street, heading up the steps, I noticed a young man bringing pottedplants and chairs out from a shop and arranging them neatly on the street. I asked him what hewas doing. We love greenery and we thought we would make the street prettier, he said,introducing himself as Baldwin Pui. He recently opened a design workshop with his wife andanother couple, right on the edge of the URAs redevelopment area. Its quiet here, similar toplaces in Japan or Taiwan, where youll find small shops like this on quiet back lanes, he said.


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He looked at some of the students heading towards Wing Lee Street. Lots of people have beenvisiting to see the old buildings. Many of them are photographers, and we make leather camerabags, so its good, he said. Ive looked at the plans for the new buildings the government wantsto put here. Its bullshit, if you ask me. Nonsense. The buildings here are so nice already. Hesaid that he hopes something creative can be done with them.

Pui went back inside to work and I sat down on the Shing Wong Street steps, next to a middle-aged man wearing flip-flops. A woman came out from a nearby building and joined him. A fewbirds chirped. Printing machines whirred in a nearby shop. The sound of construction echoed inthe distance.

Documents

Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong