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1. Waiting to land

1. Waiting to land
Zach Coleman, The Standard 5 April 2004

The fabled runway at the former Kai Tak airport is as busy as ever these days. Five cargo carriers rumble up and down the landing strip every minute at peak times, unloading freight and turning around for another run.

But these vehicles don't soar in over the rooftops of Kowloon; they are rolling down the streets. The ground they leave behind is dirt and rocks from a hill the government is levelling a kilometre to the east of the runway.

No 747s these, just dump trucks. Six years after Kai Tak's closure, little more has risen on the site than earthen mounds and a golf driving range. The government once planned to house thousands of families in new flats on the old airport grounds by this time. But nothing sleeps here except for broken-down KMB buses and rusted steel shipping containers.

They won't be getting any company soon. Shifts in the territory's economy and rising popular activism have kept redevelopment from getting off the ground. Last year's court decision on reclamation in Wan Chai sent planners back to the drawing board once more.

In the meantime, the former airport survives as the biggest open space near the city centre, providing sweeping 360-degree views of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, the harbour and the mountains fronting the New Territories. It is a grand vista, yet few visitors, save sea birds and the rare concertgoer, get to take it all in.

``Within the entire harbour district, this is the last bit where we have lots of space to work with,'' says Paul Zimmerman, a consultant on policy strategy heading the Designing Hong Kong Harbour District's effort to build a consensus on development to improve the city's quality of life.

Kai Tak's emptiness exerts a strong pull on those looking to house new facilities, such as sports stadiums or cruise ship piers; to showcase new ideas, such as automated garbage collection or water recycling; or just for another spot to build flats and roads. ``Everyone's got an idea for what they want to put on the harbour,'' says Ian Brownlee, a private-sector planner who advises both developers and environmental groups.

In recent years, few major cities have faced the question of how to reuse an old airport. Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Osaka and other cities that have opened new airports have generally kept their old ones open, mostly for domestic flights. Hong Kong of course has no domestic destinations; the choices it faces are almost open-ended. As the territory grapples with its governance, Kai Tak will prove a crucial test in reaching community consensus.

Few people regret the aborted takeoff of the original redevelopment plan. The government started quietly sketching the future of Kai Tak six years before the new airport opened at Chek Lap Kok but didn't show the public any designs until a few weeks after the old airport closed in 1998.

Then they dropped the bombshell: a self-contained ``New Town'', equivalent to Tung Chung or Tseung Kwan O, right on Victoria Harbour would house a third of a million people and provide the schools, hospitals, factories, docks and shops to meet all their needs. More than 800 individuals and groups, ranging from environmentalists to developers, roared in protest. The depth of the objections startled government planners.

Suddenly reclamation and closed-door planning were public issues. For generations, the government had paved over the bays of Victoria Harbour to make faceless neighbourhoods, leaving behind only the English and Cantonese names of places like Quarry Bay and To Kwa Wan. With both population and industry booming, hardly anyone raised a fuss as the harbour slowly disappeared to the developers' dredges. The airport itself took its name from businessmen Sir Ho Kai and Au Tak, who created the land by filling in part of Kowloon Bay in 1924 for an ill-fated housing development. When the project went bust the government took over the land and Kai Tak began accepting flights in 1927.

But 75 years later, the public demanded a say on the fate of the rest of Kowloon Bay, the last significant bay in the harbour, and whether the musty vision of Kai and Tak would be revived. It wasn't just the public's mood that had changed. In the five years that the government's plan was fermenting before Kai Tak's closure, manufacturers rushed out of Hong Kong for the mainland. The housing market crashed. The shipping industry lost steam too. By 2001, the government met critics halfway. It backed off plans to fill in the whole bay, erasing more than half of the proposed reclamation and reducing the target population to 260,000. Planners grafted in suggestions from the objectors, adding a waterfront promenade, pedestrian links to adjoining districts and a cruise terminal, eliminating the proposed factories and touting concepts for ``environmentally friendly'' utilities and public transport inside the development.

Embarrassed by the failure of Hong Kong's bid to host the 2006 Asian Games, the government also sketched in an Olympic-size stadium. The government clung tight to its internal priorities, such as major through-roads and a sewage treatment plant.

Christine Loh, then a legislator, heralded the revisions as a landmark victory for public activism.

``It's never happened before that the government has changed its mind within such a short period of time,'' she said then.

The revised plan mollified many critics. The government proceeded to let out contracts to refine its designs and clean up oil-contaminated soil around the old airport.

Then last year work ground abruptly to a halt just as the government geared up to reclaim 133 hectares of land around the old runway and the Housing Authority began laying foundations for 17 public-housing blocks.

Ruling on a case filed by Loh and her allies from the fight against the first Kai Tak plan regarding government proposal to reclaim more of harbourfront Wan Chai, the High Court declared that reclamation could only be carried out in Victoria Harbour once the government had established an ``overriding public need''. In one swoop, this put in doubt plans to reclaim land at Kai Tak for the cruise terminal, seven schools, 32,767 flats, waste transfer stations, government offices and portions of a park and the waterfront promenade.

The government hasn't abandoned the 2001 plan yet, but is opening it up for revision in acknowledgment that public pressure for a voice in governance and against reclamation has only mounted since the demise of the first Kai Tak plan.

Last month, the Planning Department took bids from consultants for a one-year contract to review the current plan with a new assumption of ``no/minimum reclamation''. The department's parent, the Housing, Planning and Lands Bureau, announced it would appoint a ``Harbourfront Enhancement Advisory Committee'' with representatives from the public and professional societies to comment on reclamation at Kai Tak. The government is also sending representatives to the privately organised forums put on by Designing Hong Kong and Citizen Envisioning @ Harbour for broad discussions on harbour development. Top government officials, however, continue to say only that there will be no more harbour reclamation after the completion of work at Kai Tak, Central and Wan Chai.

``The events and the circumstances have kind of forced them to change the process,'' says Ng Mee-kam, an associate professor in the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Hong Kong. ``The process has to be seen as legitimate.''

Not all is quiet at Kai Tak, however.

The Territory Development Department promises the dirt piles are temporary and is going ahead with a contract to demolish by mid-year the old passenger terminal that had been used for bowling lanes, go-kart racing and government offices of late. This will make way for the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corp's construction of a rail depot for the Sha Tin-Central line being laid across the site and for cleanup of any contamination underneath. Clean up of the waters next to the runway has yet to begin.

Though the Housing Authority has halted construction, planning officials now consider the public-housing sites fixed pieces of any revised plan. All told, the government's 2004-05 budget contains HK$24.8 million in funds for works at Kai Tak and an estimate that spending for projects around the doomed terminal will reach HK$4 billion.

Most plan pieces, though, are now potentially blank again, giving the opportunity once more for a new vision for Kai Tak.

This opening has put fresh air under the wings of a campaign to return aviation to Kai Tak. Leisure-time pilot Francis Chin Yiu Cheong has revived a failed drive by the Hong Kong Aviation Club to reopen part of Kai Tak runway for business, training and recreational flights by private pilots. The club faces the potential loss of its clubhouse and helicopter pad near the old airport terminal, but Chin and fellow member Joanlin CL Au say their effort isn't to protect club interests but to give Hong Kong youth the opportunity to be inspired by and learn about air and space flight in their own city and to return another level of activity and visual excitement to the harbour.

``We need a third dimension to the harbour,'' says Au, an architect.

Chin and Au would save the old terminal for air shows, aviation and space education and use it and its grounds to show off historic aircraft and spacecraft in an aviation museum. Their plan would utilise part of the runway water channel to house a maritime museum now in Stanley and give it room to display historic ships. ``Even an aircraft carrier,'' adds Chin.

He and Au would expand on the 2001 plan's sports theme by adding a Formula One racing track. They would raise funds for all this by selling off lots on the west side of Kowloon Bay for a luxury marina-style housing development, taking advantage of the new market for high-end housing units elsewhere in Hong Kong.

Though Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa has not taken up Chin's invitation of a helicopter flight to explain the concept, Chin's vision could help reignite imaginations to capitalise on the continuing shifts in economic trends and government policy.

The government started work on redevelopment in 1992 with a then-fast growing population and its need for housing foremost in mind. Public housing formed a central part of the first redevelopment plan.

Population growth is now tapering off. The government has stopped building for-sale public housing. Enough flats are available. What's missing are the harder to identify elements that would make Hong Kong proud of more than just economic achievement. Notably, tourism and building a ``world city'' are common themes in Chief Executive Tung's policy addresses these days. The Southeast Kowloon development area centred on Kai Tak has a few historic elements that could be built upon besides the old airport. Most notable: Sung Wong Toi, the remains of a rock behind which the Song emperor took refuge when the Mongol armies overthrew his dynasty in China in 1279. This could have great appeal for patriotic mainland tourists.

Tung's tourism tilt could also see Kai Tak used for cruise liners in place of jet liners. The cruise terminal in the government's current redevelopment plan is the legacy of a proposal by Hong Kong professional associations for an eight-pier cruising hub to attract lines to use Hong Kong as a home port. Star Cruises is the only line that bases ships here now.

Winston KS Chu, the lawyer long at the front of anti-reclamation efforts, wants to revive the hub proposal to showcase Victoria Harbour. Citing old tourism authority studies, he says a hub would create thousands of jobs and enable Hong Kong to compete with Singapore as the ``Miami of the East''.

Miami and Sydney are two cities that embody the international hipness that Hong Kong craves. These cities also inspired a proposal made in reaction to the government's first reclamation plan by Swire Properties. Rather than reclaim land, Swire would tear up parts of the old runway to create coves and islands, expanding the waterfront rather than reducing it as Hong Kong has always done before. Planner Ian Brownlee says Swire projects in Miami in the United States show its ideas have substance. He suggests the proposal's focus on expanding the waterfront and promoting water-based activities like sailing and rowing in Victoria Harbour are worth a new look.

The worry for Brownlee and other observers is that despite the government's avowed commitment to more public input, the end result will be the usual bland combination of wide roads and tall towers, whatever the plan says.

Some see an ominous signal in the Planning Department's request that consultants reviewing redevelopment consider putting high-end offices into Kai Tak. ``The way the government goes about things tends to create mediocrity and uniformity,'' Brownlee says.

Many give the Planning Department credit for high-quality plans that end up twisted into the same old pattern as a result of other departments poking their collective noses into implementation and land sales. ``The Planning Department is very knowledgeable,'' says John Bowden, chairman of the anti-reclamation group Save Our Shorelines. ``[But] they don't ultimately control the area that they zone.''

Getting Kai Tak's redevelopment right requires a fundamentally different institutional approach. Brownlee suggests the answer is to create a public corporation to handle both planning and development for Kai Tak as London did for its Docklands district of derelict cargo terminals. The US city of Denver, one of the few big cities to have faced Hong Kong's dilemma recently, tackled the work initially with a non-profit corporation. It then handed the project over to a master developer to turn the city's old airport into five ``villages'' centred on common spaces and pedestrian paths.

Wary of a furore echoing the Cyberport development awarded to Richard Li, the government has yet to express enthusiasm for this approach.

Yet, for all the fuss about Cyberport, Central reclamation and the West Kowloon Cultural District, Kai Tak, given its size and location, may ultimately be where the future image of Hong Kong takes shape.

``We need to put in the best quality of space and development there,'' says Alex Lui Chun-wan, a former Chinese University of Hong Kong architecture professor now advising Hysan Development. ``We don't want to make the same mistakes again. We do have time. We should make the best use of the time.''