Hong Kong S New Towns

This study of Hong Kong's new towns covers the historical and conceptual origins of new towns and satellite towns worldwide, as well as development procedures and controls, aspects of design, design problems, and the role of government and the private sector in catering to the public need. Hong Kong's physical size and rapid population growth provide unique material for this volume, which will prove useful to town planners and students in the field of community planning.

In the west, the design of new towns has always been based on an ideal model in accordance with the ideas of that moment. In the case of the latest generation of new towns in Asia, however, only quantitative and marketing principles seem to play a role: the number of square metres, dwellings or people, or the greenest, most beautiful or most technologically advanced town. "Rising in the east" shows which design principles these premises are based on.

New towns—large, comprehensively planned developments on newly urbanized land—boast a mix of spaces that, in their ideal form, provide opportunities for all of the activities of daily life. From garden cities to science cities, new capitals to large military facilities, hundreds were built in the twentieth century and their approaches to planning and development were influential far beyond the new towns themselves. Although new towns are notoriously difficult to execute and their popularity has waxed and waned, major new town initiatives are increasing around the globe, notably in East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. New Towns for the Twenty-First Century considers the ideals behind new-town development, the practice of building them, and their outcomes. A roster of international and interdisciplinary contributors examines their design, planning, finances, management, governance, quality of life, and sustainability. Case studies provide histories of new towns in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe and impart lessons learned from practitioners. The volume identifies opportunities afforded by new towns for confronting future challenges related to climate change, urban population growth, affordable housing, economic development, and quality of life. Featuring inventories of classic new towns, twentieth-century new towns with populations over 30,000, and twenty-first-century new towns, the volume is a valuable resource for governments, policy makers, and real estate developers as well as planners, designers, and educators. Contributors: Sandy Apgar, Sai Balakrishnan, JaapJan Berg, Paul Buckhurst, Felipe Correa, Carl Duke, Reid Ewing, Ann Forsyth, Robert Freestone, Shikyo Fu, Pascaline Gaborit, Elie Gamburg, Alexander Garvin, David R. Godschalk, Tony Green, ChengHe Guan, Rachel Keeton, Steven Kellenberg, Kyung-Min Kim, Gene Kohn, Todd Mansfield, Robert W. Marans, Robert Nelson, Pike Oliver, Richard Peiser, Michelle Provoost, Peter G. Rowe, Jongpil Ryu, Andrew Stokols, Adam Tanaka, Jamie von Klemperer, Fulong Wu, Ying Xu, Anthony Gar-On Yeh, Chaobin Zhou.

This book focuses on the influence of socio-economic and land-use policies on the commuting problems and quality of life of the poor in Singapore and Hong Kong. It considers the influence of self-organisation: how the mobility of an individual is constituted by structures such as transport systems or socio-economic structural factors, as well as influenced by individual decisions. Where most transport studies focus on the influence of factors such as income inequality, the gender gap, and the built environment, this book fills a gap in paying particular attention to the influence of individual decisions on commuting. Given the prevalence of the former in research, government decision-makers are often constrained by these approaches and fail to understand the commuting problems of the poor. This book argues that the self-organisation approach provides some ideas that are outside the common conceptual framework in conventional transport planning and looks to improve mobility of lower-income commuters. Relevant to social science researchers working in areas such as urban planning and transport, mobility deprivation, and poverty, this book breaks new ground in quality of life studies in the Singapore and Hong Kong contexts.

Considering Asian cities ranging from Taipei, Hong Kong and Bangkok to Hanoi, Nanjing and Seoul, this collection discusses the socio-political processes of how neoliberalization entwines with local political economies and legacies of ‘developmental’ or ‘socialist’ statism to produce urban contestations centered on housing. The book takes housing as a key entry point, given its prime position in the making of social and economic policies as well as the political legitimacy of Asian states. It examines urban policies related to housing in Asian economies in order to explore their continuing alterations and mutations, as they come into conflict and coalesce with neoliberal policies. In discussing the experience of each city, it takes into consideration the variegated relations between the state, the market and the society, and explores how the global pressure of neoliberalization has manifested in each country and has influenced the shaping of national housing questions.

Each year, more than 15 million Chinese leave the rural areas of China and move to the cities. This figure exceeds 300,000 in the case of Shanghai. By the time 2010 cedes to 2011, the majority of China's population will be living in the cities. "Shanghai new towns. Searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis" documents and analyses the meteoric rate of urbanization of the countryside round Shanghai, most particularly the part played there by new towns and new villages. This decentralized planning model takes its cue from classic Western examples. A few pilot new towns have been developed on paper withhelp from Western designers and then adapted to suit Chinese standards. This book shows how the plans have been put into practice. Photos, essays by Chinese and Western critics and descriptions of projects illustrate what daily life looks like and how these new cities function within the Yangtze River Delta Metropolitan Area as a whole. It dwells at length on the international exchange of knowledge and the differences in method.

Perhaps no other part of post-war Hong Kong experienced the trauma of rapid urbanization and industrialization as intensely as did Tsuen Wan. The district (including Kwai Chung, Tsing Yi, Ma Wan, and north-east Lantau) was once known for its sweet pineapples and fiercely independent villagers. The arrival of floods of refugees from China converted it into a loose hotchpotch of people and a polluted and overcrowded centre for Hong Kong's burgeoning textile industry and expanding port. Tsuen Wan: Growth of a 'New Town' and Its People is the story of this metamorphosis. Formerly Tsuen Wan's Town Manager and District Officer, James Hayes offers a first-hand glimpse inside government and its relations with local residents at a time when Tsuen Wan was a guinea-pig for some of the administration's first efforts at relocating masses of people and implementing large-scale urban development, town planning, and more representative district-level government. He writes with wit and insight of the local people whose traditional ways of life have been irrevocably altered by post-war growth.