Fernando Gros

Central Waterfront Development (Improving Hong Kong 2 of 3)

The Hong Kong water­front is a para­dox: a dynamic work­ing har­bour and a fant­astic city sky­line whilst also being one of the most inhos­pit­able har­bourfronts in the world. Parks and seats would help, a buffer from the relent­less highrise would help even more and some good food and enter­tain­ment would com­plete the picture.

Sadly, the cur­rent plans to develop the Cent­ral har­bourfront have too little of this. Part of the prob­lem is a gov­ern­ment mind­set that con­siders 10 story build­ings “low rise,” that doesn’t really under­stand how walk­ing can be joyful, that people might like to eat out­doors, or that some exist­ing vistas and aspects of Cent­ral could be enhanced by the devel­op­ment (and may already be “world-class).

The devel­op­ment pro­pos­als and ideas coming from the gov­ern­ment don’t func­tion on a human scale. All to often the cave into real estate rhet­oric (whatever we do, we need to increase retail space and office space), or petty polit­ics (IFC built out some vistas, so it’s time to build out some of theirs). But, a more telling place to start would be with people, with the human pro­por­tion of the development.

Put a person, one person, in front of the under con­struc­tion pier 10 on a hot day and ask what does that person feel and experience?

First off, they will feel hot, because there’s no shade — there’s just con­crete. They will feel dwarfed by the highrise that encircles them, but some­what relieved that it is at a dis­tance. They might like to sit down, maybe have a nice drink or some­thing to eat. They will also be assaul­ted by the noise, of course it is con­struc­tion, but traffic noise in gen­eral, espe­cially in the high rise noise traps that make up much of this city, is well beyond human com­fort levels at most times of the day. If the noise can’t be totally blocked out then some enter­tain­ments would be nice.

The plan­ning should start from there — com­fort­able walk­ing, shade, easy dis­trac­tion, good food and drink and relax­a­tion are no public com­mod­it­ies that are avail­able every­where in Hong Kong, but they could be part of the Cent­ral Har­bourfront. In fact, if they were this would be one of the great world water­fronts — seriously.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am. It is filed under Creativity, Daily Life, Hong Kong, Marketing, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.