Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor delivered the last Policy Address of her term on Oct 6, which shows no sign of being an outgoing “lame duck”. Instead, it surprised us with a vision for sustainable development featuring forward-looking strategic planning.
The most eye-catching part of it has to be the Northern Metropolis Development Strategy, which is considered more significant than the Lantau Tomorrow Vision project.
According to the Policy Address, the Northern Metropolis will be a 300 square kilometer urban area in the northern New Territories, with new infrastructure construction for residential and industrial development. It will include the existing Yuen Long District and North District, with six new development zones and hubs in varying stages of planning or construction, spanning seven border control points from neighboring Shenzhen. Upon completion, the Northern Metropolis will encompass an east-west economic belt along the border with Shenzhen led mainly by the construction of an international innovation and technology center. This is a big move by the special administrative region government in terms of spatial layout, but what is more daring is a “threefold” breakthrough in the city’s development strategy.
First, the new development strategy looks beyond Victoria Harbour. Hong Kong’s urban development has been centered on Victoria Harbour and it had gone quite well until it hit a bottleneck in terms of developable space. The reality is that current development centered on Victoria Harbour has reached its capacity, as indicated by the exodus of tenants driven away by soaring rents across Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Also, when the harbor-centric development strategy becomes “tunnel vision”, Hong Kong has difficulty breaking out of this rigid mindset. A ready-made example can be found in the Lantau Tomorrow Vision development project, which requires heavy land reclamation that has been strongly opposed by environmental groups all along. The harbor-centric mindset has also prevented new towns such as Tin Shui Wai from developing into self-reliant urban centers providing jobs and residences; as a result, residents have to commute out of town to work every day at a high cost in terms of money and time. By thinking out of the “Victoria Harbour-centric” box, the new development strategy offers a vision for significant city expansion.
Second, the new development strategy envisions the development of a sub-metropolitan area, which will complement the existing central business districts in Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, which can only sustain the financial industry because of a spatial constraint. This has constrained Hong Kong’s economic diversification, resulting in an unhealthy industrial structure. Many people in Hong Kong have longed over the years for at least one sub-metropolitan area to balance out the Central-TST freak, but none of the new towns can serve that purpose because of the absence of a relatively complete industry. That is what the Northern Metropolis sets out to fix. It will be led and driven by the innovation and technology industry through extensive cooperation with neighboring Shenzhen, which has been likened to Silicon Valley in the US by some Western media. The inno-tech industry is highly diversified and fast-growing in many ways, promising a much more dynamic and exciting future for many young people than the financial industry does. Upon completion, the Northern Metropolis will reshape Hong Kong’s economy structurally and geographically with a sub-metropolitan area led and driven by the inno-tech industry up in the north and the old financial industry-dominated CBD centered along Victoria Harbour in the south.
Third, the new development strategy envisions “coordinated development” with Shenzhen. Socioeconomic development always involves geographical factors and usually begins with location-related planning and surveys. Hong Kong’s northernmost regions have long been underdeveloped because of the city’s colonial past and have far more land for infrastructure and urban development than other regions except Lantau Island. Today, the Northern Metropolis is attracting so much attention because it capitalizes on its proximity to Shenzhen, which is a rising star of inno-tech development in South China. Grotesquely, Hong Kong’s northern districts are still referred to as “rural areas” sometimes, while Shenzhen, on the other side of the border, has outgrown Hong Kong by leaps and bounds for years. There is simply no better partner in joint, coordinated development than Shenzhen at this point and going forward.
This is not saying that Hong Kong is not cooperating with its northern neighbor already, but the Northern Metropolis will push Hong Kong-Shenzhen cooperation to another level. Admittedly, the ambitious strategic development campaign will keep the next-term SAR government and probably its successor busy for years to come. It should be the next “big thing” in Hong Kong’s long-term development!
The author is senior research officer of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.