At the recent joint business chambers luncheon, during which Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen expounded on some of the themes of his policy address, he rounded on activists opposed to plans for the government office buildings on Lower Albert Road and on the Central reclamation. These people, he said, expect that core urban sites should be set aside for the rearing of sheep and cattle!
Allowing for a degree of exaggeration in the making of his point, the remark is a revealing one. Tsang shares with French presidents and mainland Chinese planners a taste for grands projets and large-scale infrastructure. Those opposed to this vision of urban planning are branded kaftan-wearing, anti-development luddite tree-huggers. It is a very black-and-white view of the world.
I don't speak for the lunatic fringe, but it seems to me that neither the average Hong Kong citizen nor the average urban planning activist is calling for 'no development', but a better quality of development. Community views are somewhat inchoate, but can be summarised as follows: normal human beings enjoy neighbourhoods but, in Hong Kong, we don't do neighbourhoods any more, only vast monolithic developments benefiting big developers - and we don't like it.
The contrast between Wan Chai North and Old Wan Chai tells you all you need to know about the direction we've been heading. The epitome of this new approach is the Elements Mall/Union Square development in West Kowloon. Try walking up to this gigantic development at street level. The experience is like encountering an enormous spaceship that has landed on a piece of wasteland. Knock on the skin of this spaceship and you will hear a hollow 'plonk'. The spaceship will not accept pedestrian access; entry and exit is via four-wheeled shuttle craft on special ramps. The government loves this stuff: it's so easy to sell huge lots for record prices. So do our big developers: the high cost effectively locks out smaller competitors.
With any luck, the West Kowloon Cultural District will be a kind of urban village outside the fortress walls of Elements/Union Square. But I think we will be disappointed on that score. The district has been conceived as a grand projet and all three architects in the planning competition have sought in their different ways to soften the megalomania - not altogether successfully.
Attending the exhibition of the three concept-plan options in Wan Chai, as well as Designing Hong Kong's City Speak forum on the subject, one was left scratching one's head: 'What on earth are we going to do with all those theatres? How will we ever fill all that museum space?'