to the People in Hong Kong:

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Machizukuri : Its Nature and Significance

May, 8th, .2008 Hideki Koizumi Associate Professor, Ph.D.

Department of Urban Engineering University of Tokyo koizumi@up.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

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Contents

1. Development of Machizukuri as Change of Urban Governance in Japan 2. Diversity of Machizukuri

3. Nature of Machizukuri 4. Significance of Machizukuri

1. Development of Machizukuri as Change of Urban Governance in Japan Historical Development of Machizukuri

In 1970s environmental movements turn to earlier Machizukuri cases in inner cities as reaction for National Land Development Policies for economical growth through developments of private enterprise.

In 1980’s, progressive local authorities had began taking supportive measures for Machizukuri in inner cities, such as Machizukuri Ordinance and Machizukuri Fund and so on.

National Government also created Tools such as District Plan and Subsidies on Improvement for Livable Environment.

From late 1980s to early 1990s, Machizukuri Ordinances spread over provincial local authorities. Those ordinances were introduced as countermeasures to disordered constructions of Condos as the result of privatization in Nakasone Cabinet and Bubble Economy.

In 1990s, diverse and numerous Machizukuri NPOs burst on the scene. The rise of Machizukuri NPOs was a phenomenon worthy of special mention. The recovery process of from Hanshin Awaji Earthquake Disaster in 1995 showed people the limitation of power central government and private enterprise and the necessity of Non Profit Orgs was recognized. Creation of NPO Act 1998 was the result of wider Support from Civic.

From 2001, Koizumi Cabinet had started. He and his brains focused on Urban Regeneration through Privatization again for the recovery from the economical damages caused by the corruption of bubble economy in the early 1990s. The main tools for

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urban regeneration were deregulation on the planning and building control caused conflicts on big buildings using deregulation and citizen strongly criticize government

‘s policies for urban regeneration.

After Koizumi Cabinet resigned, national government Gradually Shifted from deregulation approach to Community Based Approach with the creation of measures such as Machinaka Kyojyu Fund, Proposal right of residents for City Planning, Machizukuri Block Grant e.t.c.

The Character of Urban Governance Change

Body: Government to Multi and Diverse stakeholders

Power: Centralized Power to Decentralized and Dispersed one

System: Top Down, Hierarchy to Net working and Collaboration based on Consensus

The reason why Urban Governance Change Global Economy

Free competition and free market as a way of “World Standard.”

Local Communities have to secure stability, sustainability and autonomy in opposition to Pressure from Global Economy

Limitation of Centralized Government aiming at Industrial Growth

Asian countries including Japan recently experienced rapid economical growth. That causes environment, social and economical distortions in local communities. As Urban Society matured, Social Values became much more plural. More Democratic governance system based on consensus among diverse stakeholders is Necessary to cope with diverse problems in local communities.

2. Diversity of Machizukuri

Restoration and Conversion of Machi-ya, Historic Shop House, in Kyoto

Conversion of Machi-ya into restaurant, shop and apartment is very successful in virtue of collaboration among NPO, city of Kyoto, and professionals.

Machi-ya conversion was recently booming in real estate market. Because of the several

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success conversions, people take a fresh look at it in real estate market. Then, city of Kyoto introduced height limit regulation District Plan for conservation of historic atmosphere in Kyoto, each community under consideration

Revitalization of Central area in Matsue City, Shimane prefecture

The central area of Matue city is declined because of suburbanization after 1980. But recently a dozen of activities for revitalization were taken by a lot of citizen groups located in the central area. They succeed in introducing a participatory design and management system for public works. In other words, they succeed in changing urban governance to get a good quality of living environment.

Social enterprise Kunma of rural village in Tenryu city, Shizuoka Prefecture

A watermill converted into a shop selling moms’ hand-made SOBA. The shop and the watermill are managed by a well organized NPO involving many villagers.

The NPO launched the activities for preservation of “Stair Rice paddy” with environmental education program for elementary school students.

Natural environment recovery through “citizen-led public works” in Kasumigaura shoreline, Ibaraki prefecture

NPO built a social system propagating water-weed with;

・Nursery gardens in elementary schools with environmental education programs in which students plant seedlings in Kasumigaura

・Forestry cooperative fostering woods for breakwater, citizens help cut trees down

・Construction of Wooden breakwater by Ministry of National Land and Transportation etc.

This project is very successful in terms of involving many citizens and groups and having many successful collaborative works among many stakeholders.

3. Nature of Machizukuri

• Incremental and continual activities

• Space oriented activities

• Community based or citizen-led activities

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• Collaborative work among many stakeholders;

• citizen groups, professionals,

• local and central governments,

• and private companies

• Consensus building or deliberative decision making

4. Significance of Machizukuri

• Good Quality of Urban space and Natural and Living Environment

• Rebirth of Urban Democracy and Urban Governance

• Strengthen Local Economy and Local Culture

• Reconstruction of Social Services System

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1

Returning Urban Redevelopment to the People in Hong Kong:

A Spatial Approach to Build a Collective Mechanism^*

(Draft)

Wing-Shing TANG Department of Geography Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

(wstang@hkbu.edu.hk) 1^st May, 2008

Introduction

Redevelopment activities are imminent in Hong Kong. The magnitude of potential redevelopment is huge, as there are, defined by the Planning Department, in the built-up area 9,300 private buildings of 30 and more years old that are in need of some kind of physical improvement. The dilapidated housing condition has mixed with poverty in some districts, causing great concern in the society. Accordingly, redevelopment has received the merited attention in the Chief Executive’s (equivalent to the Mayor’s) Policy Address in January 2005. In 2007, the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), the statutory body responsible for redevelopment, even announced that it was going to redevelop 400 old buildings, in the form of 40 or so projects, in the succeeding 7 years. Nevertheless, people have queried the effectivity of the major agent of redevelopment, be it the URA or its predecessor the LDC (The Land Development Corporation), and its approach. It has been challenged for ignoring, among others, the social dimension of redevelopment and people’s participation as well as enacting an inflexible land resumption ordinance. Based on an investigation of two redevelopment projects, Tsuen Wan new town’s Seven Street Redevelopment Project (hereafter K13) and Wanchai District’s Lee Tung Street (henceforth H15) Project (see Figure 1), this study outlines the problems of the current approach of urban redevelopment. It argues

* Paper presented at the International Workshop on “Building Participatory Governance for Urban Regeneration: East Asian Experience”, held by Korea Research Institute for Human Settlement, at Anyang, Korea, on 7-8 May, 2008. Thanks are due to KRIHS for funding my participation in the workshop and Dr. Park Se Hoon, in particular, for the extension of invitation. Gratitude must also be expressed to the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (HKBU2137/04H) and the Research Committee of Hong Kong Baptist University (FRG/06-07/II-81) for funding part of the research and the Wanchai District Council for funding the consultancy project entitled “The future plan of Wanchai”. Errors, however, remain mine.

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that these problems are attributable to the prevalence of a land (re)development regime, which favours property owners at the expense of citizens who are non-owners. The former are deemed to have possessed political rights, economic entrepreneurship and responsible citizenship. Then the study draws on a consultancy study for the Wanchai district and proposes a new approach to resolve some of these problems. This requires us to adopt a spatial approach elaborate the concerned flat or the building undergoing redevelopment, together with its physical improvement, in relation to other buildings, both close and far apart, and to the agents using it and their activities, as well as to socio-economic and environmental processes that exist at other points in time. Due to the prevalence of the multiple, overarching and interlacing webs of space-time in the city, the spatial approach must rethink about socio- spatial relations of urban redevelopment and their translation into routines and spatial strategies of affected agents.

The current policy research: chaotic conceptualization Introduction

Hong Kong has a long history of urban redevelopment. Private developers have been the major agents of change since the end of the 19^th century. What is common among them is the fact that each project usually redevelops one or more buildings. While public or quasi- public agents like the Housing Authority and the Housing Society have also been redeveloping the old housing stock in the city since the 1950s, isolated cases of comprehensive redevelopment by the public sector, involving more than residences, did not really take place until the mid-1960s in the Central District. Nevertheless, large-scale comprehensive redevelopment only became the norm after the change in the territorial development strategy in the early 1980s, which focused development no longer in the outskirt, in the New Territories, but in the inner city. After the establishment of the LDC in 1988, on the basis of public-private partnership, and the introduction of a new land-use zone called comprehensive redevelopment area (CRA, later renamed as CDA, comprehensive development area), the number of sites undergoing comprehensive redevelopment has increased considerably and spread across the whole built-up area.

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Figure 1. The Map of Hong Kong

Source: adapted from: http://www.hong-kong--hotels.com/images/guide/hong-kong/map.gif

In light of this scale of redevelopment in Hong Kong, one has no difficulty in finding the relevant research on urban redevelopment. The policy study literature on urban redevelopment is generally restricted to technical issues such as whether the LDC or the URA is a better institution (e.g., Adams and Hastings, 2001a, 2001b; Lai, 1993; Ng, 2002;

Tang, 2002), the reasons that hinder its effective operation (Cuthbert and Dimitriou, 1992;

Fong, 1985), whether the price of compensation is appropriate, and the extent to which residents’ quality of life has been improved (Kam, Ng and Ho, 2004; Ng, et al., 2004). Some concern themselves more with the mechanism of urban redevelopment and its effects (Ng and Tam, 2000; Susnik and Ganesan, 1997), and others focus on the elderly in particular (Chui, 2001). One thread that runs through the whole literature is that the operation of the LDC or the URA takes the form of public-private partnership (Adams and Hastings, 2001a;

Yeh, 1990). Given the importance of property development on redevelopment, Hong Kong’s model is further refined by some researchers as property-led. Carrying a bad connotation, the latter has been criticised for being too dominated by the market and should be replaced by a more community-oriented approach (Ng, 2002; Ng, Cook and Chui, 2001) or social

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sustainability (Chan and Lee, 2008). Instead of joining this literature bandwagon by writing about urban redevelopment in abstract, suffice it for me to focus myself on elaborating two more recent projects for our later discussion of the role of citizen participation in redevelopment. The two examples are the K13 and H15 projects.

The two cases of urban redevelopment: familisation of the underlying mechanisms

The redevelopment history of the K13 project started with the rezoning of a CDA in October 1990. Bounded by four streets in the north, the west and the east, plus three other streets inside it, the K13 project was also named the Seven Streets (see Figure 2). These streets had been the living quarters of the working class for over three decades since industrialisation took place in Tsuen Wan, then a new town, in the 1960s. The Hong Kong Government first invited the Hong Kong Housing Society, which also owned a public housing estate within the site, to take charge of the redevelopment project in 1990. Then, in April 1997, the LDC took over it after its predecessor withdrew on financial grounds. The LDC selected one private developer as the development agent, which was later ‘bailed out’

by the URA by a sizable financial compensation. Having consolidated a link-site nearby from the government, the URA tendered the project out to another developer in July 2002. The developer was to construct on the site a commercial-residential complex, comprising 414,000 ft² of gross floor space with a plot ratio of 5.3, 520 flats and a 5-storey shopping mall.

Amidst these changes in the development agent, a concern group, comprising mainly owners, was set up in 1990, to expedite the redevelopment process. As soon as the acquisition principles were announced by the LDC, the affected owners were broken down into the owner-occupied and the rental. The latter staged protests to demand fairer compensation as they could not obtain the full home purchase allowance. To increase the amount, many of them even evicted their tenants who lived in their properties. With the aid of social worker and local councillors, these affected tenants managed to form their own concern group at the very end of the 1990s, to fight for compensation and rehousing. It conducted a local survey and petitioned the LDC, the Housing Society, the Legislative Council (the legal making body of Hong Kong) and the Chief Executive. While some singletons and elderly succeeded in getting rehoused, about 400 tenants still lived in the worsening site condition in early 2000. The Executive Council (the decision-making cabinet of the Chief Executive) approved to invoke the Lands Resumption Ordinance to evict the

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remaining residents, clearing the way for demolition and construction. A new middle-class, residential estate, called Vision City, was erected, and its units were put on sale in early 2006.

When owners started to occupy their properties at the end of 2007, Seven Streets for the working class finally disappeared from the landscape of Tsuen Wan (Tang and Wong, 2007).

Figure 2. The K13 Project

QuickTime?and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Source: http://www.ura.org.hk/html/c800000e13e.html

The H15 project actually consists of two non-contiguous sites, Lee Tung Street and McGregor Street, in the older part of Wanchai (see Figure 3). Since the latter is smaller in size as well as less interesting, whenever one talks about the project, one refers to the former.

Lee Tung Street had been famous for its printing industry since the 1950s. The print shops, mainly operated in the form of small business, developed their own letters, envelopes, name cards and traditional Chinese calendars, and since the 1980s, produced items loosely related with wedding, thereby acquiring the nickname ‘Wedding Card Street’. Although most of the buildings along the street were still structurally sound, the potential rent gap accrued to redevelopment had attracted the LDC to proclaim it a site of redevelopment in 1997.

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However, it was not brought into the limelight until the URA re-announced, under its auspice, to redevelop the two streets in late 2003. The H15 project covers a site area of 8,900 m², involving 54 buildings, 930 affected households and 647 affected property interests. By December 2007, the URA unveiled their latest plan of redeveloping the site into a themed

‘Wedding City’ lined with shops related to marriage, including 67,948 m² of residential space, 11,749 m² of retail, 3,179 m² of government/institution/community and not less than 3,000 m² of public open space.

Figure 3. The H15 Project

Source: http://www.ura.org.hk/usrImg/800000/apbd_leet_site.jpg

Immediately after the announcement of redevelopment, while the majority of the residents were still skeptical of the project, some, with the help of advocate social workers, started to organise themselves as the H15 Concern Group. Their objective was to fight for substantive alternatives other than monetary compensation and outright eviction, including on-site exchange of a newly erected flat or shop for an old one. While the URA insisted on the residents taking the cash compensation and yielding their property rights, the H15 Concern Group conducted studies to make sense of the redevelopment, wrote, with the

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support of many literal critics, commentaries in newspapers, held exhibitions, road shows, workshops and forums to enlist supporters, both within and without the district, and engage them, staged demonstrations to the URA to initiate fair dialogue, solicited supports from the Wanchai District Council, and petitioned the Legislative Council and, finally, the Chief Executive to intervene into the project. In the course of negotiation, the H15 Concern Group, with the aid of advocate planners, even formulated their own plural plan, ‘Sustainable Regeneration: Lee Tung Street’. Later, they submitted a planning application to the Town Planning Board (TPB) based on Section 16 of the Town Planning Ordinance. Having rejected their application, TPB highlighted and appraised the principle of community network underscored in their application and recommended the URA to include it into their own plan.

Although H15 appealed to that decision later, they were further turned down. When the URA submitted its master plan for the approval of TPB, H15 petitioned and literally adjourned the meeting. More petition in the rescheduled meeting did not stop URA’s master plan from being approved in May 2007. While the struggle of H15 has continued, including the staging of a hunger strike, all residents and shops were evicted with the invocation of the Lands Resumption Ordinance. All buildings cannot escape the fate of total destruction by the bulldozer, and Lee Tung Street finally disappeared from the urban landscape during the Christmas holiday in 2007.

It is apparent from these two redevelopment cases that whenever Hongkongers mention about urban redevelopment, they actually refer to real estate development and that urban redevelopment must be done in a ‘rational’ manner. To everyone’s surprise, these points have been overlooked by the literature on urban redevelopment. There is a tendency for Hongkongers to equate redevelopment with real estate development, that is. In the rest of the world, however, redevelopment can mean anything. A site can be redeveloped into a park to increase the naturalness of a city or to into a square to affirm values of struggle; the land resource can be deployed (to build factories) to increase employment opportunities as the major objective; houses/flats are built on the site not so much for sale as for allocation to the needy as public housing. If there is more than one alternative, why do Hongkongers privilege property development at the expense of others? In fact, Hongkongers seldom problematise the equation of redevelopment with real estate development. The limited topics of discussion that one commonly finds in the literature bear testimony to this observation: debates about whether the LDC or the URA is a better institution for property development; whether the

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price of compensation is commensurate with the market value of the property; whether the affected residents’ quality of life has been improved by the new property development; and etc. The literature merely takes property development for granted. To redress this imbalance, the first issue for urban redevelopment is, then, to problematise that equation.

There is another dimension: colonial governance. It refers to the ways the government goes about enforcing property rights. Hongkongers not only restrict themselves in their discussion of urban redevelopment, but also expect it to be carried out in a particular manner labelled as ‘rational’. This ‘rational’ course is, as argued above, undoubtedly moulded by the land (re)development regime. Being part of it, however, colonial governance can still be separated from it analytically. The land (re)development regime assumes the government to enforce the rights to property so desperately needed by the functioning of property.

Developers may mobilise the government and its apparatus to confirm their rights. In deciding, the government draws on all sorts of knowledge to make sense of the politio- economic reality and formulate possible actions. It is always possible that these rights may be challenged. In that case, the land (re)development regime suffers a temporary setback. But in most of the cases, these rights are guaranteed, albeit sometimes in slightly modified forms of the original requests. Once these rights have been guaranteed and accompanied actions implemented, they form the ‘rational’ practice of the society. It is expected that urban redevelopment, one component of societal activities, should not deviate from this ‘rational’

course. In the end, the land (re)development regime is perpetuated. It is in this sense that I argue that although colonial governance is part and parcel of the land (re)development regime, it is still analytically necessary to delineate it separately.

The Land (re)development regime The birth of the regime

A cursory reading of Hong Kong’s history informs us that it is difficult to detach it from landed and property development. When the British first stepped their feet on Hong Kong Island in the early 1840s, they proclaimed all land plots as Crown land. This was deemed necessary not only to govern the development of the then new colony, but also to collect the revenues essential to development. Since then, land has occupied a pivotal role in the development of Hong Kong. More recently, Hong Kong’s property development industry has entered into a new era since the late-1960s, as Chinese land capitals started to emerge as

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a prominent force, besides the British. Unlike their counterparts, Chinese land capitals relied more on the burgeoning stock market to expand their source of capital. Then the two markets of landed and property and of stock were closely interweaved, with boom or bust in one being paralleled with a similar development in the other. Whenever people gained money from the stock market, they re-invested in the landed and property market, vice versa. With the declining rate of profits for the manufacturing industries and, conversely, the increasing profit margin of land development in the 1970s, and partly propelled by the opening-up of mainland China to the world, industrial capitals started to close down their operations and construct commercial/residential properties on these premises whereas land capitals took over or merged with industrial capitals to increase their land bank. These added fuelled to the already bubbling landed and property market. The increasing financialisation of the real estate sector, the expectation of an increasing appreciation of property value by the general public, and the concentration and centralisation of capital led by the land capitals had altogether rendered land and property even more prominent in the economy and the society.

Then, since the mid-1980s, the maintenance of economic prosperity in the last colony before independence, on the one side, and, on the other, in the returned territory after reunification to the motherland, demanded some concerted actions by the British Government and the Chinese Government, respectively. The ideal candidate of such an economic multiplier was, obviously, the real estate sector. Measures to promote this sector have the effect of further pushing the property boom to reach its climax in the late 1990s. Most people loved this boom, as they benefitted from it one way or other. It is important to mention in passing that as most Hongkongers have just emerged out of poverty recently, owning a home is a dream on which the developers have capitalised to promote home ownership as a norm. In other words, there has developed in Hong Kong a land (re)development regime since the 1970s, within which all practices, from all types of capital, the government, the urban planners, the social workers, the community organisers, the local councillors, the LDC, the URA, the Housing Society, the middle class to a considerable part of the working class, favour property development, almost at all costs.

The silence of urban alternatives

The prevalence of the land (re)development regime in Hong Kong has a few implications for our discussion of citizen participation in urban redevelopment. Property

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development has been taken as the norm. This is something that the society has never challenged until lately. As a result, redevelopment alternatives other than real estate development, which are absent in our mindset, are discouraged from our discussion.

Redevelopment is a progress in societal development

Hongkongers further restricted themselves to the limited interrogation of property.

Due to the aforementioned finacialisation of land and property, one significant performance indicator in the account book of any land and property development company is the after-sale profit. The latter gets bigger with a larger volume of sale, which, in turn, hinges upon, among others, the volume of property production. Since the value of a property will not be realised unless it is consumed, there is every intention by the developers to persuade, induce and, even, manipulate the people to increase the consumption of the newly constructed properties.

One message to the general public is instrumental: a newer property is better than its older counterpart. Related to it is another that the larger the size of a property, the better it is.

Having partly taken advantage of the modernist thinking or our time, which conceives of everything as a material object, the developers have successfully twisted the objective of the general public to be the quest to purchase a newer and more spacious property. In a modernist society like Hong Kong, which always looks into the future, possessing a newer and more spacious property certainly represents a material improvement in the living standard over the past. If a redevelopment project constructs new buildings with plenty new properties, it is an improvement to the society that one should highly praise. Put differently, any attempt to obstruct, even in a minor way, the progress of any redevelopment exercise is considered a hindrance to societal progress.

Redevelopment works on the principle of highest-and-best-use

Like any commodity, a property has both use and exchange values. Yet, in Hong Kong, the latter has an absolute supremacy over the former. This has a lot to do with the words and deeds related to the land (re)development regime. When developers induce people to purchase properties, they construct a prospect that the value of any property, big or small, will appreciate substantially in the future. They support their construction by repeatedly accusing the Hong Kong Government of adopting a high land price policy. Because the supply of land is restricted at all time, the supply of new properties is bounded to be small

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and, consequently, prices will keep on increasing. This accusation has some germs of truth in it, as the supply of land, excluding the requirement for public housing, has, as stipulated in the Annex of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed in 1984, been restricted to 50 hectares per annum. It is not the purpose of this paper to deconstruct the accusation of the developers.

(One may challenge the accusation by mentioning in passing that the developers also request the government repeatedly to stop putting up public housing for sale, thereby upholding property prices.) What is important for our argument is: the constructed prospect that the value of any property will appreciate over time has become a fact widely upheld by the society. Thus, for any property purchaser, he or she considers not so much its use value as its exchange value, particularly in monetary terms. This attitude is extended to any transaction related to redevelopment. If a property owner is going to give up his/her property in redevelopment, he must, in exchange, be compensated. Although compensation may take many forms including cash dollars and rehousing, it is the former that is widely practised in the private market. The amount of cash compensation, in terms of assessable value of a property, is the price signal that allows any owner to decide whether he or she is going to sell it to the developer. If the price of compensation is right, an owner, as a rational economic man, will sell the property. In sum, in any transaction in redevelopment, the price of compensation is the crux of the problem, and other alternatives like rehousing are merely out of the concern. This is the norm of the society. On the one hand, in case someone refuses to be relocated and starts to negotiate, he or she must be greedy, bargaining for a price of compensation higher than the right one being offered. On the other hand, since the developer has offered the right price of compensation, it should be allowed to redevelop the site to the highest and best use. Any action that potentially disrupts this ‘normal’ operation will be despised by the society.

Redevelopment concerns property owners only

Given the importance assigned to property ownership by the land (re)development regime, owners are the ‘king’. Because of their expectation in property value appreciation, owners are assumed to have a strong interest in their neighbourhood. They will do their best to protect as well as upgrade it. One can identify their actions with all sorts of positive appraisal like stability, self-reliance, responsible, entrepreneurship and community pride. In corollary, in case they start not to care about their own property and neighbourhood,

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something must have really gone wrong. Time is ripe, and it is reasonable too, for a developer (including the government) to take over their role and redevelop and improve upon the neighbourhood. This is the rationale behind urban redevelopment. Unlike owners, however, tenants are usually neglected and, even, stigmatised. Judging by the ability-to-pay, tenants are those who cannot afford purchasing and owning properties. More importantly, a tenant rents a place and lives there as long as the rent is affordable. Once the latter is raised to a prohibitive level, the tenant will leave and live elsewhere. Of course, an imagined scenario is that if a property becomes affordable for whatever reasons, he or she is expected to purchase one. Thus, in comparison, tenants are much more mobile. Being a transient population, tenants are, by definition, rootless. Without attachment to a place, they contribute to the decay of a neighbourhood. As such, their displacement together with the construction of new owner-occupier properties, which secure stability, represent an improvement to the community at large. Urban redevelopment should, then, be received with open arms by the society. Due to the fact that tenants are not property owners, developers in urban redevelopment are expected not to concentrate their negotiation efforts on them, as long as they have already been compensated decently.

Redevelopment under colonial governance

The assignment of political rights under the landlord-leaseholder relationship

Hong Kong has practised a leasehold land system, in which the Hong Kong Government, the landlord, leases land plots to individual land users, leaseholders, each for a fixed time period, with a land premium and under specified conditions. The lease spells out a one-to-one relationship between the landlord and the leaseholder. The leaseholder-developer can then ‘sell’ the properties built to individual ‘buyers’, who are legally part of the leaseholder, albeit an extremely minute part of it. Or the leaseholder can sub-lease the land to another developer. Once signed by both parties, the lease cannot be violated, and upon expiration, the two parties can negotiate and sign a new lease. However, in the middle of the lease, the leaseholder can, upon agreement with the landlord, change the use after paying a land premium, whereas the landlord can compulsorily resume the land from the leaseholder for public purposes after paying the fair compensation. These rights are guaranteed by various laws and ordinances including the Lands Registration Ordinance, the Buildings Ordinance and the Town Planning Ordinance, and various government departments.

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What is important for our discussion is that the land (re)development regime builds on this leasehold land system to define political rights for various members of the society. As the lease is only between the two parties of the landlord and the individual leaseholder(s), only the latter is eligible for the right to negotiate in any dispute about a particular land plot.

Any outsider has no role to play at all. A case in point is the tenants who live in this particular land plot and are substantively affected by the dispute, yet they are excluded merely because they are not leaseholders. The others are those leaseholders who consume other plots of land contagious to the disputed one. Even though they are affected in one way or other, they are also excluded. This is due to the fact that the disputed lease involves a one- to-one relationship between the landlord and that particular leaseholder. Therefore, legally, it is extremely difficult to think of the community, which consists of not only a bundle of leaseholders but also an even larger number of tenants and, more importantly, their relationships. The interests of a community, which are rendered legally invisible in the leasehold system, are considered more as sentiment than as a legitimate concern in itself in the land (re)development regime.

Ordinary citizens are rendered invisible in the modernist town planning system

The town planning system in Hong Kong was designed to facilitate colonial governance. The political rationality of the Hong Kong Government was to intervene into the economy and the society, nevertheless under an illusion that such intervention was only necessary and minimal. In translating this rationality into any programme, and being, lately, interwoven with the land (re)development regime, the government was left with no alternative but intervening into land and property, the most important economic sector. This required the government to exercise control over land development, yet, at least superficially, in a limited scope and, possibly, in an invisible way. It was within this context that the Hong Kong Government found the modernist version of town planning highly conducive to completion of this delicate colonial governance¹. The modernist thinking emphasises on material objects. There are in cities buildings, which are linked up by physical infrastructures.

This physically integrated structure is the surface upon which economic and social activities take place. The planner’s task is to manage this structure to remove economic, social and

1 This statement differs from arguments that have attributed all problems in the built environment to town planning, on the one hand, and, on the other, elaborations that have ignored the role of scientific knowledge in contributing to colonial governance.

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environmental problems. This thinking allowed the Hong Kong Government to rationalise the separation of land and property from the rest of the economy and the society, thereby identifying the material spatial structure as the object of governmental practices. Leaving the rest to the society and the economy, town planning, therefore, concerns itself explicitly with material objects of land use only.

Materiality is a conspicuous trait in the town planning system. The latter is about the formulation and implementation of development plans, which are toolkits to guide the development of land at the district, sub-regional and territorial levels. At the top of the plan hierarchy is the Territorial Development Strategy; it provides broad guidelines for the long- term development of the whole territory. Below it are sub-regional development plans, which translate territorial goals into sub-regional objectives for the five sub-regions of Hong Kong.

In particular, in outlining the urban future, they identify potential developable lands. At the bottom, the district level, planning takes the form of district plans called Outline Zoning Plans (OZPs). The two other statutory plans are Development Permission Area Plans (DPAPs) and Development Scheme Plans (DSPs). While the former cover areas usually in the rural setting, the latter are prepared for sites under redevelopment. These statutory plans indicate the proposed land uses, generally zoned as residential, commercial, industrial, open spaces, government/institution/community uses, green belts and other specified uses. The land use zonings show the intended type of development on each land parcel, which is employed as the basis for development control. To facilitate better control, there are two more types of larger-scale, non-statutory plans under OZPs, namely Outline Development Plans (ODPs) and Layout Plans (LPs). They exhibit more details about detailed layout and land formation at the site level. In sum, these plans are all about the determination of the total land requirements for various uses and their distribution. The complexities involved in the development and use of land, together with the environmental, social and economic contexts behind it, however, are assumed away. In substitution, they are represented in those nominal land use categories, which are further reduced to their objective, numerical land area requirements. Town planners’ task is to meet these requirements. They need not to be acquainted with the multiple aspects of development problems of actual land users. Rather they work with the material requirements of such and such hectares of land and the very use categories they themselves had devised (being guided by the Hong Kong Planning Standards and Guidelines, a trend-projected reference manual indicating the scale, location and site

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requirements of various land uses and facilities) and come up with, most importantly, an efficient allocation of space.

It is difficult to imagine any substantive role of ordinary citizens in plan formulation, as they are institutionally neglected in the system. The co-existence of statutory and non- statutory procedures allows the government to render many plan formulation processes invisible in the first place. It is by law that statutory plans are subject to public scrutiny. In contrast, non-statutory plans, which make up the majority, furnish the government with discretionary power to do whatever in accordance with its goal and purpose. It can merely reject any enquiries or even complaints outright on confidentiality ground, if not on professional and administrative ones. The government always fudges on the statutory and non-statutory boundaries and assign individual plans to either category dependent on the prevailing socio-political circumstance. Many plan formulations are, therefore, rendered invisible to the public, merely because they are non-statutory.

There are many hurdles that institutionally exclude ordinary citizens from participating in any plan formulation even if the plan is statutory. One cannot expect much from statutory plans, since the Town Planning Ordinance has rendered many tasks invisible.

In fact, the old ordinance, which was enacted in 1939, has a total number of 14 sections only, covering the bare basics of plan formulation and approval. Simplicity still took the reins even with the latest, the Town Planning (Amendment) Ordinance 2004 – the only major update after more than 60 years (Figure 4). The original bill introduced in 1999 intended to bring in public consultation even during plan formulation, but was defeated after severe objections waged by the developers. Thus, even by today, plan-making is a process of negotiation only between the landlord, being represented by the Planning Department, and the concerned leaseholder(s). It is not a surprise that as the unit of calculation is land parcel and the concern is land requirement, the requirements of land owners, underpinned by the landlord- leaseholder relationship, occupy the central concerns of the town planners. The only difference that the 2004 ordinance makes is: while others were totally ignored in the past, they are now given a chance to air their concerns. This recognition of other voices will remain cosmetic than effective until the society is prepared to tackle the aforementioned crux of the problem – the landlord-leaseholder relationship.

Figure 4. Participation in Statutory Plan-making Process

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Source: http://www.pland.gov.hk/tech_doc/tp_bill/pamphlet2004/figure1_e.jpg

This cosmetic has led to the cherishing of high hope for the ‘democratisation’ of decision-making bodies like Town Planning Board (TPB) and Appeal Board. The former is in charge of plan approval whereas the latter interrogates plan appeals, if any. According to the 2004 ordinance, it is the TPB that is responsible for reviewing the voices of opposition.

Ill-informed by representative democracy, both critics and resident groups have expected that once the TPB has been democratised, their demands will be rendered visible and, since they are by themselves totally reasonable, be accepted and incorporated into the concerned plan.

This wishful thinking is understandable, because the colonial government has been practising a process of administrative absorption of politics. Under this process, those who have great

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influence on the society such as the social elites and the businessmen were co-opted into the administrative decision-making body, including the mighty Land Development Policy Committee, the TPB and many other consultative committees. As a result, on the one hand, a certain level of elite integration was achieved and the interests of the business sectors were also guaranteed. This in turn made the colonial rule legitimate and provided a stable social and economic condition for its governance (Goodstadt, 2005). On the other, the concerns of ordinary citizens were made invisible and totally neglected. In the past, members of, say, the TPB came mostly from the business (within which a few developers’ representatives dominated) plus one or two members from the academics and the society in general as cosmetic, and, consequently, many planning decisions were biased towards the business. This makes the call, by the critics, to democratise the TPB reasonable and acceptable, and the 2004 ordinance can be deemed as a ‘positive’ response by the government. But politics do not work out as the critics would like us believe. Recollect the case of H15 Concern Group. It submitted its own plan to the TPB and raised objection to the URA plan, but they were all turned down. Its later attempt to sue the URA after land resumption ended with similar discouraging result, as they were not property owners as well as they illegally occupied government land (once a land parcel was resumed it is converted into government ownership).

This case is a testimony to the fact that ‘democratisation’ works without recognition of the landlord-leaseholder relationship, is a total myth; this path merely cannot, and will not, take citizens any further in planning related matters.

The principle of highest-and-best-use emphasises economic entrepreneurship

The operation of the land development agent, be it the URA or it predecessor the LDC, put up further hurdles in front of ordinary citizens. Dated back to the beginning of the land (re)development regime in the late 1970s, when developers queried the system’s bias toward public uses. The Special Committee on Land Production, later renamed as The Special Committee on Land Supply, was set up to compile the annual supply of developable lands in the whole territory. Later, changes in the state apparatus were implemented to further facilitate land production. The then Lands Divisions spelt out its objectives as follows:

“the development of land resources to meet the requirements of the Government’s policies and programmes in both the long and the short term; to ensure that the limited supply of land is put to best use in

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accordance with good planning principles and in accordance with the conditions of lease or grant; to ensure that Crown Land is not used illegally; and to provide services to the public in relation to land matters.”

(Bristow, 1984: 112; emphases added)

This emphasis on the principle of highest-and-best-use represents the ABC principle of land transaction in Hong Kong. No wonders that it repeated itself in the LDC and, later, the URA, and is coined the practice of prudential commercial principles. Both the LDC and the URA cannot operate at a deficit. This can be achieved by, among others, redeveloping the land parcel to its highest possible saleable floor space. On the one hand, the community interest is a sentiment that does not produce more floor space. Ordinary citizens who invoke such concern in their opposition in redevelopment projects cannot capture the sympathy of the society. On the other, since the URA can redevelop the land in joint-venture partnerships with private developers, the latter’s quest for higher profit adds extra weight to exchange values. Redevelopment can only take a bigger and taller form, not the converse. Nor can individual owners defer land redevelopment, as their interests have been transformed into private interests, which stand against the public interest. On this point, the URA has a decided advantage over the LDC on land resumption matters. The URA Ordinance empowers the agent to apply for ‘direct’ resumption of land, even though it has not negotiated with owners at length and has not satisfied the Lands Department that it has taken all reasonable steps to otherwise acquire the land. In other words, the URA can first apply to the Chief Executive for land resumption and then compensate the affected property owners later under the Lands Resumption Ordinance.

Summary

It is apparent from the above discussion that in case of redevelopment, buildings are usually replaced by newer, and supposedly better, buildings. Residents or commercial tenants/owner-occupiers affected are claimed to have benefited from it, and so does the society. As a result, everyone should support redevelopment. This positive as well as dominant attitude towards redevelopment is due to the prevalence of the land (re)development regime, which is supported by the colonial governance in terms of the landlord-leaseholder land system, the modernist town planning system and the highest-and-

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best-use land management system. Accordingly, the Hong Kong society emphasises material objects, property owners and exchange value at the expense of people, the community interests and use value. Undoubtedly it has prospered economically, but equally true is that an increasing amount of people is displaced by redevelopment and some of them even live in poverty. If Hongkongers do not recognise the influence of the regime (within the context of colonial governance), it is difficult to make sense of the imbalance and propose more reasonable ways of redevelopment.

A spatial approach to build a collective mechanism for urban redevelopment Introduction

The above has provided a powerful critique to many approaches that the West would like us adopt. They include citizen participation (Arnstein, 1969), public-private partnership, stakeholders approach and sustainable development. These approaches suffer from the fact that their highly generalisable concepts have usually abstracted away their respective local context. Besides, developed in the West, these concepts have made a highly controversial assumption that they are directly applicable to elsewhere in the world. This has neglected that various parts of the world have different paths of development. In the case of Hong Kong, as evident in the above discussion, the local context of colonial governance plus the land (re)development regime have decisive influence on the opportunities and constraints of urban redevelopment. Obviously, Hongkongers, and other Asians too, require a new approach to urban redevelopment that starts with the local context.

The following elaboration draws on an experimental study to work out a future development plan for Wanchai district in Hong Kong. Wanchai is one of the districts with abundant inner city ‘pockets of decay’. One then saw the multiplication of redevelopment projects in the district, with the H15, described above, as one example. Besides, since Wanchai became a Chinese residential district in the early 20^th century, many residents have lived there for three or so generations. These local people have developed their ‘own’ local histories, memories, sense of belongings and identities. Informed by their desire, they have contested and struggled against the superimposition of skyscrapers on their traditional neighbourhood, as the case of H15 Concern Group has also illustrated. It was the interwoven of these two forces that led the Wanchai District Council to propose a future development plan that can guide discussion for further (re)development. It also stipulated that the district’s

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citizens should be consulted in the plan formulation. It was within this reference that the experiment was carried out.

Conclusion

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Returning Urban Redevelopment to the People in Hong Kong:

A Spatial Approach

to Build a Collective Mechanism Returning Urban Redevelopment