Urbanization in a Global Perspective

Reimagining Sustainable Urban Communities in Hong Kong

“Reimagining Sustainable Urban Communities in Hong Kong,” published in Singapore Management University’s Asian Management Insights, highlights lessons learned from designing Hong Kong’s New Towns–satellite towns that are carefully planned developments outside the urban core built in several phases, or generations to accommodate Hong Kong’s post-WWII population boom. The lessons learned include (a) planning balanced and mixed land-use patterns, (b) promoting public transport use and walking, (c) designing public spaces for residents’ quality of life needs, and (d) designing for better urban micro-climates.

The article also examines three conceptual strategies for Hong Kong’s new towns and how these strategies address impending challenges like environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and community placemaking. These three concepts are (a) The Hybrid City, (b) The Ecological City, and (c) The Happy City. They apply environmental and social urban design principles in creating Hong Kong’s ‘third generation new towns’–New Development Areas (NDAs) outside the central city. These concepts attempt to combine European Modernist planning theories with post-Industrial British planner Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model into self-contained environmentally and socially sustainable communities, adapted to Hong Kong’s unique attributes.

I presented this literature review summary, along with an extensive list of supplementary readings, to my class USP 515 Economic Applications for Urban Studies. See the project link below for the full report.