How Hong Kong’s Airport Completely Transformed the City

In 1991, after months of arduous negotiations, political wrangling and secret meetings, British prime minister John Major and Chinese leader Deng Xiaopeng signed a formal agreement to build a new airport in Hong Kong.

Normally, new airports wouldn’t require such high-level diplomatic manoeuvres. But this was no ordinary airport. It was a vote of confidence in the future of Hong Kong, whose time as a British colony would come to an end in 1997. And it wasn’t just an airport. The Hong Kong government was about to embark on a HK$200 billion package of infrastructure projects that included new roads, railways, bridges, expanded container ports and dozens of hectares of reclaimed land on which tens of thousands of homes, offices and shops would be built. Officially known as the Airport Core Programme, it was part of the larger Port and Airport Development Strategy, colloquially called the Rose Garden Project, laying the seeds for a future Hong Kong to blossom.

It wasn’t just transformative, it was revolutionary. “They used the airport to reshape the city,” says Max Hirsh, author of the 2016 book Airport Urbanism and the founder of an urban planning consultancy of the same name. In the late 2000s, Hirsh was working on a doctorate in architecture and urban planning at Harvard, looking for a city that had recently built a new airport. He chose to focus on Hong Kong. “I was meant to go there for six months to do research and that turned into 10 years,” he says. Now based in Berlin, he recently turned his attention back to Hong Kong for the city’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where he and landscape architect Dorothy Tang presented “Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975–2025” a case study of the Airport Core Programme. 

“Without this project, Hong Kong would not have been able to become the global hub it is today,” says Hirsh. And yet many aren’t aware of just how much the Rose Garden Project reshaped Hong Kong. It hides in plain sight, a radical reorganisation of the city that is today taken completely for granted. 

Kai Tak wasn’t enough

Many Hongkongers have fond memories of the city’s original airport, Kai Tak, which is associated with the golden years of Hong Kong’s economic boom. But almost from its very beginnings, the government realised its awkward location, caught between Victoria Harbour on one side and a quickly densifying city on the other, was far from ideal. In 1948, British urban planner Patrick Abercrombie published a report that noted that Kai Tak is “generally recognised as a very undesirable location.” 

The next spring, the British undersecretary of state proposed building a new airport on the shores of Deep Bay, but its proximity to the border with mainland China — then in the final stages of a civil war between Nationalists and Communists — was considered too much of a security risk. Although Kai Tak was expanded and modernised in the 1960s, in 1973, the Civil Aviation Department asked a consultancy to propose a site for an entirely new airport. 

The consultants proposed several locations, but each had fundamental problems. Tuen Mun was too close to the airspace of the planned Shenzhen airport. Yuen Long had the same problem, plus it would endanger the birds of the Mai Po marshland. Expanding Lamma Island or Cheung Chau would block shipping lanes. The consultants ultimately concluded that the only two feasible sites were on the shores of Tolo Harbour near Sha Tin and Tai Po, or on Chek Lap Kok, a small island off the north side of Lantau Island that could be expanded through land reclamation. 

The Hong Kong government mulled over the findings for five years before deciding Chek Lap Kok would be the best option. Preliminary plans were drawn up – and shelved until 1987, when Kai Tak reached capacity and the need for a new airport was considered especially urgent. 

New Airport Master Plan (1992) by Greiner and Maunsell.

A question of diplomacy

Then came June 4, 1989. The suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square turned China into an international pariah and shook confidence in Hong Kong’s impending handover, which had been agreed upon five years earlier. That’s when then-governor David Wilson announced the Rose Garden Project: not just a new airport but a bold investment in the future of post-handover Hong Kong. The negotiations between London and Beijing commenced. 

A former British ambassador to China, Percy Cradock, was tasked with diplomatic backchanneling. “In Beijing’s planning the airport was to become an instrument in China’s full rehabilitation after Tiananmen,” he noted in his 1994 memoir, Experiences of China. But Beijing was officially concerned that the airport project would deplete Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves just before the handover, and behind the scenes, it also regarded the Rose Garden and its financing as a way for Britain to maintain influence over Hong Kong even after the handover.

Pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong lambasted the new airport in the Legislative Council, putting pressure on the colonial government. “People regard the new airport with a feeling of helpless resignation; there is no public enthusiasm for it to speak of,” claimed Federation of Trade Unions lawmaker Lau Chin-shek in a speech at Legco. “To the grassroots, the massive infrastructural development project brings immediate harm before they can ever enjoy its benefits. The promised rose garden is full of deadly thorns.” 

Despite the political squabbles, the negotiations were successful: Beijing eventually came around to the idea that the new airport was vital to the future of Hong Kong. “The agreement was welcomed with relief and enthusiasm in Hong Kong and the Hang Seng Index shot up,” noted Cradock. “A serious crisis had been narrowly averted. The territory now seemed certain of having the airport it needed to ensure its future as a great financial and trading centre.” Major and Deng’s meeting in 1991 set the course for an epic infrastructure project the likes of which Hong Kong had never seen.

More than just an airport  

“Hong Kong wasn’t the only city in Asia to do something like this,” notes Hirsh. At the same time Hong Kong was building its new airport far outside the city centre, other Asian cities like Shanghai, Seoul and Osaka had embarked on similar projects. But none of these other airports had as much of an impact on the cities themselves, partly because they weren’t accompanied by the sheer amount of infrastructure that Hong Kong was building. 

“What was brilliant about the way it was done in Hong Kong is, they moved the airport 35 kilometres outside the city, but they really thought about how people were going to get there,” says Hirsh. “They were really embedding the infrastructure right in the heart of town.”

Along with the construction of the airport itself, the Airport Core Programme included the construction of an adjacent new town, Tung Chung, that would be home to thousands of airport and airline employees. Both Tung Chung and the airport would be linked to central Hong Kong by the Airport Express railway and the new Tung Chung MTR line, along with three new bridges, a new expressway, and a third tunnel under Victoria Harbour, the Western Harbour Crossing. Hundreds of hectares of land was reclaimed from the harbour for all of these new linkages, and entirely new developments were built on top of it, linked together by the MTR and Airport Express. 

Today, Hong Kong’s two tallest buildings, the IFC and ICC, stand as monuments to all of this airport-related infrastructure. So does the West Kowloon Cultural District, built on land reclaimed for the airport expressway and railway; Herzog and de Meuron’s design for M+ even includes a special exhibition area, the so-called Found Space, built around the walls of the Airport Express tunnel. 

“It reinvented the downtown,” says Hirsh. Hong Kong’s city centre was gradually reoriented around these new developments, creating new hubs like IFC Mall that architecture scholar Jonathan Solomon calls global villages – “hubs for the city’s global infrastructure with fast access to the airport.” The closure of Kai Tak also enabled the transformation of large parts of the city where development had been restricted by aviation-related height limits. 

For the biennale exhibit, Hirsh worked with Tang to map out all of the structures taller than 100 metres that have been built since Kai Tak closed. There are many. New commercial hubs in East Kowloon — like the so-called CBD2 — and on the east side of Hong Kong Island, such as Taikoo Place, wouldn’t have been possible with Kai Tak still operating. “You can see how much it constrained development and how releasing that airspace opened up new opportunities throughout the city,” says Hirsh. 

The closure of Kai Tak allowed height limits to be removed, prompting a new wave of high-rise development. Map and illustration by Dorothy Tang and Max Hirsh

A city on the move

Few cities are as oriented around air travel as Hong Kong. Before the pandemic, the Hong Kong International Airport carried more than 68 million passengers per year, making it the fourth busiest airport in the world for international travel – no small feat for a city of 7.5 million people. And while those numbers are still recovering from years of Covid-related travel restrictions and a sluggish economy — Hong Kong is now in ninth place — the airport remains an inescapable psychic presence throughout Hong Kong. “I’ve never been to a city that makes it so easy to connect to people around the world,” says Hirsh.

In a way, Hong Kong has always been predisposed to that kind of global connection. From its very beginnings as a British colony, the city was a nexus of the global Chinese diaspora, with a significant part of its 19th century population consisting of people waiting to board ships to California and other points overseas. Regular waves of emigration throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have taken Hongkongers overseas and shaped the city’s culture. 

“When I first came to Hong Kong, I realised it is fundamentally a diaspora city,” says Hirsh. “At every level and every class of society you have people with family members living in China, in Australia, in Canada.” Migration and movement has always been a fundamental part of Hong Kong’s character; the Airport Core Programme translated that into a physical rearrangement of the city’s space. 

Today, few people refer to the Rose Garden Project; it’s a name that has been largely relegated to history. But the garden continues to bloom. 

Airport Urbanism: Making Hong Kong is part of the Hong Kong exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. It runs until 23 November 2025.