This is the conclusion to a four-part series on Hong Kong’s harbourfront. Check out the rest of the articles here.
It’s a beautiful evening and Jason Hilgefort is sitting with his dog Elfie on the steps outside Central Pier 2, enjoying a drink with a friend. As Elfie excitedly greets passersby — many of whom know her from her regular visits to the piers — Hilgefort looks around and contemplates his surroundings.
“It’s kind of amazing,” he says. He takes a sip. “You’ve got this logistical network, a flow of spaces, places to sit. Trees. Aesthetically, I could be really critical as a designer about how they treated the space, but at the base level, inherently, it’s great.”
This isn’t just idle talk: Hilgefort’s job is to think critically about space. As the co-founder of Shenzhen-based urban design studio Land + Civilization Compositions, and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Landscape Architecture, he has spent years thinking of how to create public spaces that are lively, comfortable and engaging. And in his spare time, he often finds himself at the Central piers. He and Elfie have made friends while hanging out here; it’s even where he met his wife. They had their wedding party on the roof of Pier 4.
And yet, as much as he enjoys spending time there, Hilgefort has mixed feelings about the piers. “I like that we’re just sitting here on these simplistic steps,” he says. “You make your own space. There’s something really magical about how it’s not trying too hard. But there’s also something disappointing that there hasn’t been much effort put into it. Sometimes it feels like it’s treated like the side of a bus stop.”
Fine-tuning the details
We may have chosen the Central Ferry Piers as one of our five favourite harbourfront spaces, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Far from it. It has become a good place mainly by accident; nobody actually sat down and thought about it holistically. If you want to be critical, there’s plenty to take issue with.
Why, for instance, are most of the ferry pier rooftops inaccessible and unused? Why are there vast planters or ornamental shrubbery, rather than green spaces that are accessible or at least environmentally beneficial, instead of requiring heavy maintenance and lots of chemical treatments? Why are the piers cut off from the rest of Central by an underused bus terminus, vacant lots and huge roadways?
You could ask similarly probing questions about every one of the public spaces lining both sides of Victoria Harbour, in Kowloon and on Hong Kong Island. And for Paul Zimmerman, founder of Designing Hong Kong, that’s exactly what we should be doing, now that so much of the harbourfront is accessible.
“The connectivity is there,” he says. “The strong point is that you can just continue to walk along the waterfront and you have such a diversity of spaces. It’s always changing. It’s just fantastic that all of this experimentation is taking place.”
What he means by experimentation is that many of the new harbourfront spaces that have opened in the past few years are overseen by the Development Bureau’s Harbour Office, rather than the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD), which manages most of Hong Kong’s parks, plazas and beaches — including the Central piers and many older harbourfront spaces. Freed of the LCSD’s long-established conventions and regulations, the Harbour Office is testing out new ways of managing public space, from epic playgrounds to privately-managed event spaces to different types of public seating.
“They’re taking risks on the harbourfront,” says Zimmerman. “They’re trying new things in different ways. And it doesn’t always work out. We’re seeing some issues, like some materials that don’t work very well under the hot sun. But that’s the point of the experiment.”
So what comes next for these Harbour Office spaces? It’s hard to say. But Zimmerman thinks that as the office becomes more established, it will have more opportunity to fine-tune the details of its spaces as it learns from its experiments.
Bridging the gaps
The harbourfront’s design details aren’t the only things that need to be worked out. There are still missing pieces to be filled in. In Kowloon, the Cheung Sha Wan and Tai Kok Tsui promenades are islands cut off from the rest of the harbourfront by port facilities. There are similar gaps in Hung Hom, Kowloon Bay and Yau Tong.
“There are just idiotic things that persist because the government is not resolving it,” says Zimmerman. He scratches his head at the recently-built temple on the edge of the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter, which is closed to the public and thereby cuts off a portion of the harbourfront promenade. “You could just open up the bloody fence,” he says. But for mysterious reasons, the temple’s land lease does not include that requirement.
There’s a similar situation at the Shun Tak Centre in Sheung Wan. Not long ago, anyone wanting to continue along this part of the harbourfront had to detour through the upstairs shopping mall because the surface road that passed beneath the centre was occupied by parked cars. When Designing Hong Kong discovered that the land lease never permitted the road to be used for parking, the path was cleared. The only problem is there’s no footpath: pedestrians share the space with cars zooming past.
Zimmerman recalls asking the Shun Tak Centre’s management to provide a safe pathway for pedestrians but they refused. “They said it’s not in their lease to do that, so they’re not obligated,” he says.
Improving connections
It’s worth noting that, whatever gaps remain, the situation has changed dramatically since we last asked about the future of Victoria Harbour in 2018. Back then, nearly 60 percent of the harbourfront was inaccessible. Today, you can now walk along nearly the whole of Hong Kong Island’s harbourfront, and in Kowloon, 70 percent is now accessible.
There’s more to come. The Development Bureau plans to connect the rest of the Kowloon harbourfront by 2028, including new paths between Tai Kok Tsui, the West Kowloon Cultural District and Tsim Sha Tsui, and more links along the shores of East Kowloon.
Hilgefort thinks it’s a good opportunity to start thinking outside the box. “The next step is to think about perpendicular lines,” he says. Reaching many harbourfront spaces means crossing big roads or navigating a series of footbridges or underpasses. “We’ve gone to all this effort to make something for the public, but then we don’t have a decent idea of how the public is going to get there,” he says.
He also wants people to start thinking about how the interface between land and sea could evolve. In the past, Victoria Harbour was lined by beaches and other types of natural shoreline. Could that direct connection to the water be restored? Could long-destroyed natural elements be restored, like shellfish habitats, or mangroves and marshlands?
There’s plenty to think about. At least it’s finally possible to ponder these questions along an increasingly accessible and well-connected harbourfront.
“Look at that,” says Hilgefort, pointing across the harbour to West Kowloon, which is bathed in the day’s final rays of golden sunlight. “I’ve never seen the sun hit M+ like that. It looks like a Ferrero Rocher.”
He pauses to consider the beauty of the scene, then raises his plastic cup. “Cheers.”