Mee Kam Ng

World cities or great cities? A comparative study of five Asian metropolises

Abstract Few researchers have studied world cities from the perspective of sustainable development. This paper argues that in this era of globalization cities should aspire to be great cities, rather than just world cities. Great cities are places with an enlightened mode of governance; where technological and economic advancement sustain global and local development, thereby enriching socio-economic, human, cultural and environmental capital. Informed by this conceptual framework, and with the help of experts and participants in two public fora, a set of indicators was developed for benchmarking cities of the world. This study compares and contrasts five globalizing metropolises in Asia: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Shanghai. It is found that through progressive globalization, these cities have accumulated considerable economic wealth to build world class infrastructure. However, their ability to address sustainability concerns such as developing an enlightened mode of governance to nourish social and environmental capital remains diverse and less certain.

The Role of Planning in the Development of Shenzhen, China: Rhetoric and Realities

This paper examines the role played by socioeconomic and spatial planning in the development of Chinas first special economic zone (SEZ), Shenzhen. More specifically, it analyzes the impacts of socioeconomic five- and ten-year plans and Master Layout Plans in Shenzhens metamorphosis from an industry-based SEZ relying on domestic investment (early 1980s) to a modern metropolis sustained by an export-oriented economy. The authors explore the tension between local officials aspirations to make Shenzen a 21st century world city and the dual obstacles of policy control by the central government and the need to harness local development within Shenzhen. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H70, O18, O20. 2 figures, 4 tables, 67 references.

Development Control in Post-Reform China: the Case of Liuhua Lake Park, Guangzhou

Abstract The initiation of administrative and economic reforms in China has not only led to the introduction of market mechanisms in allocating urban land resources, these reforms have also created new socio-economic demands, which have to be satisfied through spatial restructuring. To offer effective guidance over land use changes and development, formal development control mechanisms are established. However, land use planners in China continue to face an uphill battle in controlling development within a society with little respect for rules and regulations. Development control mechanisms are not effective because of the absence of well-established planning-related institutions with clearly defined duties. Planners role in monitoring spatial change is constantly challenged by the arbitrary intervention of high-level government officials on one hand, and widespread illegal land transactions and land use developments on the other. This paper discusses these issues with reference to an “illegal” restaurant development in the Liuhua Lake Park in Guangzhou.

Land‐use planning in ‘one country, two systems’: Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen

Abstract This paper studies the political economy of urban governance and land‐use planning mechanisms in the ‘one country, two systems’ of mainland China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). It is argued that the market economy of Hong Kong had, over the years as a British colony, established an efficiently‐run regulatory system of land‐use planning. The current land‐use planning mechanisms are biased toward economic growth as a result of its executive‐government‐led and business‐interests‐dominated political structure. The challenge for Hong Kong as a relatively autonomous SAR, therefore, is to incorporate the social and environmental dimensions in planning for territorial development within a wider regional context as a result of economic and political integration with China. In mainland China, the reforming socialist planned economy has now embraced privately and foreign‐owned enterprises though the Communist Party and the government have retained strong political control. A ‘dual’ l...

URBAN SYSTEM PLANNING IN CHINA: A CASE STUDY OF THE PEARL RIVER DELTA

This paper argues that before 1978, the Chinese state, a police state in the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, aimed at total administration of the economy and society. Central investments determined local spatial development. Economic reforms and administrative decentralization after 1978 allowed local authorities to pursue their own development, leading to many planning problems. To regain control over spatial development, the state now employs urban system planning to regulate development in city regions. The Pearl River Delta Urban System Plan (PRDUSP) is a case in point. To overcome myopic regional development and environmental issues, the PRDUSP lays out a development strategy in which cities are organized into hierarchies around three metropolitan areas, have different functions, and are connected by development and growth axes. Various measures and policies also are recommended. All these suggest that the Provincial Government of Guangdong is searching for a new way of regional governance....

The Changing Role of the State in High-Tech Industrial Development: The Experience of Hong Kong:

This paper is an examination of the role of the Hong Kong government vis-à-vis governments in Japan and other Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs) in high-tech industrial development. It is argued that, whereas governments of Japan and other Asian NIEs have played very important roles in facilitating industrial restructuring, the Hong Kong government has so far refrained from direct participation in industrial development. Although the Hong Kong government has assumed an important position in the course of economic development in the territory, especially in terms of land-related economic activities, it has little vested interest and experience in directing industrial developments. It was not until the 1990s that the government switched from a ‘positive nonintervention’ to a ‘minimum intervention with maximum support’ industrial policy and began to play a more active role in facilitating industrial upgrading. The effectiveness of the changing industrial policy and the prospects for high-tech development in the territory are reviewed by examining the challenges and opportunities faced by the Hong Kong government in facilitating high-tech industrial development.

From Government to Governance? Politics of Planning in the First Decade of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

This paper investigates when and why a civil society will challenge growth-biased plans, made by a top-down mode of planning within the non-democratic setting of an executive government-led and economics-first society. In the controversies surrounding the Governments plans to further the filling in of the beautiful Victoria Harbour to produce land for “development” in the first decade of the post-colonial Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), participatory and multi-stakeholder-centred planning practices emerged when many interested parties were dissatisfied with the official reclamation plan. Using the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, an anti-reclamation civil society organization managed to take the government to court and successfully stop further harbour reclamation, forcing government officials to heed alternative views on harbourfront planning, and to pay attention to non-government professionals ready to use their skills to serve the growing civil society. However, despite this earl...This paper investigates when and why a civil society will challenge growth-biased plans, made by a top-down mode of planning within the non-democratic setting of an executive government-led and economics-first society. In the controversies surrounding the Governments plans to further the filling in of the beautiful Victoria Harbour to produce land for “development” in the first decade of the post-colonial Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), participatory and multi-stakeholder-centred planning practices emerged when many interested parties were dissatisfied with the official reclamation plan. Using the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, an anti-reclamation civil society organization managed to take the government to court and successfully stop further harbour reclamation, forcing government officials to heed alternative views on harbourfront planning, and to pay attention to non-government professionals ready to use their skills to serve the growing civil society. However, despite this early success, the progress of the case so far suggests that participation remains tokenistic, producing minimal fundamental institutional changes. Hence, professionals within and outside the government continue to face an interrelated, two-pronged challenge: how to further empower lay citizens as they seek new ways to institutionalize a more participatory mode of planning governance.

Public Engagement as a Tool of Hegemony: The Case of Designing the New Central Harbourfront in Hong Kong

Hong Kong society nowadays is overwhelmed by the rhetoric of hegemony, but there is no serious attempt to discuss it, especially in the domain of urban development. This article expands on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of urbanizing Gramsci to resolve contradictions of space under increasing urbanization by urban specialists and applies it to investigate the public engagement exercise of Central harbourfront planning in Hong Kong. By dissecting its contents and procedures, the article illustrates how public engagement has insisted on technical rationality, thereby perpetuating the functioning of the land (re)development regime. In consequence, the ordinary residents may have been excluded from ‘rational’ consideration in the (re)development of Hong Kong.

Civic Engagement, Spatial Planning and Democracy as a Way of Life Civic Engagement and the Quality of Urban Places Enhancing Effective and Democratic Governance through Empowered Participation: Some Critical Reflections One Humble Journey towards Planning for a More Sustainable Hong Kong: A Need to Institutionalise Civic Engagement Civic Engagement and Urban Reform in Brazil Setting the Scene

Lately, a new piece of public policy vocabulary has turned up on planners’ horizons: civic engagement. For many older planners, this seems like just another term in a bundle of similar ones relating to involving and engaging the public, citizens, in planning processes in some way—public involvement, advocacy planning, citizen participation, collaborative planning, inclusive partnerships. Is the promotion of the idea of civic engagement just another piece of political rhetoric, which, after some adjustments to formal procedures, relapses into “business as usual”? Or is it something more? Is it a reflection of a wider movement in politics and society towards creating a different kind of polity, with a different way of going about the business of politics and policy making? Does the momentum behind the idea of “civic engagement” reflect a renewed effort to transform democratic life from the kind of elite, techno-democracy so much promoted in Europe and North America in the mid twentieth century towards ideas of more participatory forms of democracy which have continually challenged this elite model? And if so, what is the hope that a more participative model can address the challenges of promoting more liveable and sustainable urban places, for the many and not just the few? This Interface explores the potential of the idea of civic engagement in this context. There is already literature about a variety of different kinds of techniques for “doing” planning work in more participatory ways, in which citizens, not planners or politicians, take the driving seat in developing policy ideas and project briefs. The Interface of a previous number of this Journal (9(1), Forester, 2008) provides a rich illustration of one of these, the “planning for real” approach. In this Interface, we hope to encourage practising planners and researchers to explore the relationship between the practices of “involving citizens”, the evolution of the wider polities in which such practices are situated, and the formation of a “public realm” which is not only liveable and sustainable but also which cultivates qualities which foster vibrant, critical and creative political community. This all sounds very fine and idealistic, cynics will say. But look at the practice of “public participation.” Back in the idealism of the later 1960s, this was widely advocated as a way to transform urban politics. But it got taken up instead as a managerial strategy for “regularising” urban conflicts, and turned into procedural requirements which, as David Booher notes in his piece, squeezed the transformative energy out of the social movement. Or did it? Certainly that was the experience in many places. But if we look

Spatial practice, conceived space and lived space: Hong Kong’s ‘Piers saga’ through the Lefebvrian lens

By applying the Lefebvrian lens, this paper tries to understand why unlike previous similar cases, the latest removal of the Star Ferry and Queen’s Pier was so controversial. To Lefebvre, embedded in ‘spatial practices’ that ‘secrete’ a place are two contradicting spaces: ‘conceived spaces’ produced by planners to create exchange values and ‘lived spaces’ appropriated by citizens for use values. Applying Lefebvre’s framework to examine the ‘Piers saga’, it is found that the pre‐Second World War (WWII) piers were ‘conceived’ by spatial practices of a colonial and racially segregated trading enclave. The public space in the commercial heart that housed the previous generations of piers was not accessible to the Chinese community, thus denying them opportunities to appropriate them and turn them into ‘lived’ spaces. It was only after WWII when the Government carried out further reclamation to meet the needs of an industrializing economy that inclusive public spaces were conceived in the commercial heart, enabling the general public to ‘appropriate’ them as ‘lived’ space. When the Government planned to remove this very first ‘lived’ space in the political and economic heart of the city to conceive further reclamation for the restructuring economy, the more enlightened citizens were determined to defend it.