Dennis Lee

Opinion | True Hong Kong ingenuity needed to rescue the West Kowloon Cultural District

If the variety of food is what visitors love the most, let’s make it a ‘must visit’ food and drink destination. If the world worships Bruce Lee, let’s build a dedicated museum

With all due respect to chairman Henry Tang, land is not the only funding resource here and relying on it is not thinking out of the box

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Dennis Lee

Published: 9:30am, 21 Oct 2023

Some 25 years after the West Kowloon Cultural District was proposed, we are still struggling with how best to use the 40 hectares of land at the southwest corner of Kowloon and establish a sustainable financial model for it.

According to Henry Tang Ying-yen, chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, different means have been explored to staunch the operating costs that were draining like “rivers of blood”. Funds, including the one-off HK$21.6 billion granted in 2008 and HK$4 billion borrowed from a bank, are expected to run out in March 2025.

Tang is reportedly proposing to sell property rights to private developers instead of asking for more public funding. “Land is our only resource. We must think out of the box to use the land to bring us enough capital for future operations,” he said, adding that no cultural district in the world was self-financed.

What went wrong with our vision – if there had been one?

From the design competitions to the CEO appointments, from the development objectives to resource usage, problems can be traced back to when the idea was first conceived.

In 2002, British architect Norman Foster won the competition to design the district, with a canopy meant to hover over the entire area. This was not well received and many questioned the practicality and cost of the design. In 2003, developers were invited to bid for the project. Five consortiums submitted proposals based on Foster’s design, which the government changed to require a canopy covering just half the area.