Design Anthology - Asia Pacific Edition
The People’s Places
There’s a lot you can’t do in a typical Hong Kong park. You can’t ride a bicycle or skateboard, you can’t play music or toss a frisbee, and don’t even think about taking your dog for a walk. These are just some of the rules posted at the entrance of many local green spaces, and they represent an approach to public space management that can charitably be called ‘restrictive’.
And it isn’t just management: the design of public spaces is often meant to limit public activities. Walls, flooring patterns, fences, planters studded to prevent them from being used as seats — these are just some of the tools used to prescribe how people may use Hong Kong’s parks, plazas and streets. A typical park may have basketball courts and jogging trails, but few spaces where people can have a picnic, kick a ball or simply relax.
But things are changing. Perhaps slowly and inconsistently, but they are indeed changing. Over the past few years, Hong Kong’s approach to public space design has undergone a notable shift away from the more rigid approach of the past. In the past several months alone, two large new waterfront spaces — the Belcher Bay and Wan Chai promenades — have opened with the express intention of giving the public barrierfree open spaces where they can do things that are usually prohibited in the city’s public parks. And even before that, Hong Kong’s approach to public space design was gradually shifting towards more permeable, less structured environments that give users increased freedom to decide exactly how to use their own recreational space.
Credit for this goes to government agencies like the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) and the Architectural Services Department for finally adopting a more liberal attitude to public space, but the biggest push has come from the outside. Organisations like Designing Hong Kong and the Walk DVRC Initiative have raised public awareness of urban design and successfully lobbied the government on a number of specific issues, while neighbourhood concern groups have helped promote informal recreational spaces.
Some of the biggest agents of change have been architects and designers — particularly those who have been able to negotiate the layers of bureaucracy that surround public space design and management in Hong Kong. In West Kowloon, local firms Dennis Lau & Ng Chun Man Architects & Engineers and ACLA, together with Dutch landscape architects West 8, worked with the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority — a statutory body independent from government departments — to design a new waterfront park with flexibility and permeability as its guiding ethos.
In 2012,The Oval Partnership worked with Swire Properties and the LCSD to redesign public plazas near Star Street in Wan Chai. Their strategy included reconfiguring the spaces in a more open manner, replacing harsh overhead lighting with lights embedded in the ground, scrapping the infamous pink ‘bathroom tile’ paving material in favour of a granite-concrete composite, and integrating seating into curvaceous planters instead of relying on awkward benches.