October 12th, 2011
Construction of a new underground highway built on the last bit of land reclamation permitted in Victoria Harbour
If you are reading this somewhere in Hong Kong, odds are you’re sitting on a piece of land that was once a part of the sea. Since 1851, more than 60 square kilometres of land has been reclaimed from Hong Kong’s waterways, an area greater than Kowloon and nearly as large as the whole of Hong Kong Island.
Most of that reclamation took place along the shores of Victoria Harbour. That practice will come to an end next year with the completion of reclamation for the Central-Wan Chai Bypass, the last project permitted under the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, which was passed in 1996 after a rash of reclamation proposals left the public worried that Victoria Harbour would one day disappear under a mountain of landfill.
Land in Hong Kong remains scarce, however, and the government remains intent on keeping reclamation in its toolbox. “It is necessary to resume land production by reclamation of an appropriate scale outside the Victoria Harbour so as to provide land to sustain the social and economic development of Hong Kong in the long run,” said the Permanent Secretary for Development (Works), Wai Chi-sing, last May. The government is now conducting a study of possible reclamation sites. Public consultations will begin next month.
Though Hong Kong has been reclaiming land for the better part of two centuries, it is a markedly different city than it was a century or even a decade ago. These days, nearly every major infrastructure project meets with controversy. Opposition to major development projects is often fierce, as was the case with last year’s protests over the construction of the Express Rail to mainland China. In such a stormy atmosphere, is more land reclamation really feasible?
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November 10th, 2009
Queen’s Pier in 2006. Photo by David Wong
It was bad enough when they tore it down — now there’s the question of where to rebuild it. After the storm that swept through Hong Kong when the government tore down the Central Star Ferry pier in 2007, making way for a land reclamation project that is extending the waterfront by 300 metres, it was careful to avoid the same mistake when it removed the Queen’s Pier in 2008.
Instead of being knocked down, each piece of pier was carefully preserved and put into storage. Though it wasn’t particularly remarkable on its own, the pier was important as a symbol of British colonialism, being the place where British royals and Hong Kong governors landed when they arrived in Hong Kong. Together with City Hall and the Star Ferry pier, it formed part of a trinity of white Modernist structures that represented the straightforward ambition of postwar colonialism.
Now that the land reclamation project is well underway, the question is whether the Queen’s Pier should be rebuilt on the new waterfront, or in its previous location, on the shores of an artificial lagoon. The government is pressing for the former, which would allow the pier to continue functioning as a pier, but heritage activists insist on the latter. Yesterday, a group of them proposed that Edinburgh Place (the collective name for City Hall and its environs) be declared an historic monument, which would legally require the government to put the pier back where it originally stood.
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October 13th, 2009
Tourists usually head to the Avenue of Stars to get their fix of Hong Kong’s famous skyline. But there’s an infinitely more rewarding alternative just a couple of kilometres to the west. Well off the sightseer’s radar and overlooked even by most locals, the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade offers an incomparable 360-degree view of Victoria Harbour and the dizzying skyscrapers that flank it.
In a way, West Kowloon is the culmination of a hundred-year trend in Hong Kong history: land reclamation. Much of the modern-day city is built on soil dumped into the harbour, but none of the past landfill projects compare to the vast scale of West Kowloon, which replaced several square kilometres of water with highways, railroads, malls, offices and apartment towers. There’s so much new land, in fact, that people are still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. That’s why, for the time being at least, a large swath of it remains vacant and undeveloped.
Nature has already made its introduction and much of the vacant land is covered in small trees and craggy brush. With waves crashing on one side and the hissing of cicadas on the other, the West Kowloon waterfront feels like an obscure bit of country shoreline — except for that panoramic view of Hong Kong’s glossy skyline, of course.
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October 30th, 2007
Last year, a huge fuss was raised over the future of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry pier. Built in 1957, the stout, white building, topped by a boxy clock tower, was one of Hong Kong’s last civic structures remaining from the postwar era. Thousands of people passed through it every day as they travelled across the harbour from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui. As plans were hatched for a new waterfront reclamation project that would shift the shoreline by 300 metres, however, it became clear that the pier’s days were numbered.
What was the big deal? Hong Kong is, after all, a relentlessly-paced city that has always placed a higher value on economic growth than anything else, especially local heritage. But, to the surprise of the reclamation project’s government backers, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers decided that the Star Ferry pier was one building they weren’t willing to see demolished. More than its architectural value, it was its place in the territory’s “collective memory” that caused so many people to lash out against its destruction.
Hong Kongers voiced their discontent in different ways. One group occupied the pier and unveiled protest banners; others made art, like Karden, who created a series of linocut prints depicting the Star Ferry clock tower. Together, the combined tide of support for the pier was so great that it made headlines around the world, interpreted not simply as a movement to save an old building but the birth of a new, critical discussion on Hong Kong’s heritage, culture and identity. Ultimately, though, despite their success at generating a widespread public discussion, their efforts did not prevent the Star Ferry pier from being razed last summer.
Since its handover from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong has been forced to consider its own place in the world. The emergence of a new generation, born in Hong Kong, well-educated and lacking the refugee’s drive to succeed at all costs, has only added to this identity crisis. For the first time, notions such as collective memory have entered the Hong Kong vocabulary, to such an extent that it seems that even a dour media organ like the South China Morning Post has taken a liking to the concept, arguing that Hong Kong’s intangible cultural heritage must be protected, such as when the “King of Kowloon” died last summer.
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