Tomorrow’s City – Mechanisms in Creating Better Urban Places

Day 1 : 12:45 – 13:35

Leading global cities are significantly rethinking the planning and design of the urban realm in the wake of a deluge of newly available knowledge having become available as a result of technological innovation, global pandemic, and data from climate and environmental crisis. These cities seek to create adaptability and resilience in the face of upcoming and unknown challenges whilst addressing concerns with ageing population demographics, social equity, health, safety, pollution, and waste. New means of conceiving, delivering, and managing urban realm development is being undertaken as a means by which to create better places to live, with local mayors increasingly advocating for new urban solutions. Every city has its own pathways to change, formed from a cultural, statutory, and topographic hinterland. The session will explore how change for better places is happening around the world and whether knowledge, approaches, and techniques can be adopted to suit Hong Kong.

Learnings

  • Why can’t Hong Kong make significant urban change as being evidenced around the world? What’s stopping us?
  • With lots of new development areas in Northern Metropolis on the way, what can be expected there, and what more needs to be done in the established areas of the city?
  • Could whole-system, structural mechanisms for the city be effected to replace the current siloed nature of implementation and management agencies?
  • Are there new indexes and measurements that could lead to a quality driven consideration of the urban environment in Hong Kong?

Post-event Actions

  • Consider how new modes of consultation, communication, and decision-making might lead to better quality outcomes in the design and management of urban space.
  • Explore new methods and timelines of accounting and project or programme appraisal to reconsider the traditional cost-benefit approaches to project implementation.
  • Ascertain whether business-as-usual approaches to urban management are acceptable in keeping Hong Kong competitive in the face of global competition for better places to live and work.
  • Develop key recommendations to be further developed and shared with the professional community and political decision-makers.

Speakers

Barry Wilson

Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design

President

President and Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design, a UK Chartered and Hong Kong Registered Landscape Architect, Fellow of the Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building Engineers, an accredited Construction adjudicator and CEDR Accredited Mediator. A long standing Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong, he sits on various HKSAR Government Advisory Committees, Mediation Panels and International Arbitration Courts in both Hong Kong and China. He received award from the China International Urbanization Development Strategy Research Committee in 2012 for his contribution to China’s urbanisation transformation and the 2019 Reed & Mallik Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers for his paper “An Outline to Futureproofing Cities with Ten Immediate Steps”. A long-term advocate of sustainable, forward thinking development approaches, his consultancy practice – Barry Wilson Project Initiatives has been tackling urbanisation issues in Hong Kong and China for nearly 30 years. His book – Futureproof City : Ten Immediate Paths to Urban Resilience was published by Routledge in 2021.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

1. Hong Kong Government to appoint an “Urban Champion”, acting like a mayor across silos, to generate a new vision for renewal of the urban realm that prioritises citizen’s health, safety, and equity; promotes innovation, quality and renewal and rejects traditional fastest, biggest, cheapest development scenarios.

2. Adopt new quality and impact based metrics to assess societal development and success – phasing out the use of one-dimensional, consumption-lead economic growth measured by GDP.

Christine Loh

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Chief Development Strategist, Institute for the Environment

Christine Loh is Chief Development Strategist at Institute for the Environment at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Scholar in Residence at Asia Society Hong Kong (2023-24). She serves on the boards of CDP Worldwide, Global Maritime Forum, New Forests Pty Limited, and Towngas Smart Energy. She is a published author of many academic and popular works; her latest book is on COVID-19 from a global governance perspective.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

To help bring sustainability come ‘alive’ in class and in community.

Matthew Potter

WilkinsonEyre

Board Director

Matthew leads the Hong Kong office and has played a pivotal role in many of the practice’s award-winning projects in the region. He recently completed the ‘Sky Bridge’ at Hong Kong International Airport, the world’s longest airside bridge. He is currently working on the restoration of the Grade I listed State Theatre; new conservatories for the China National Botanical Garden; and a state-of-the-art campus on Pokfield Road for the University of Hong Kong.
Before moving to Hong Kong, Matthew worked on a number of landmark projects including London King’s Cross Gasholders; Guangzhou International Finance Centre; and was the project architect for the Cooled Conservatories at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, working on the project from its inception to its successful completion in 2012.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

1. Our buildings to have a more considered relationship with the outside: much more use of passive means of environmental control before using highly-efficient active systems powered by renewable energy. Buildings that have shaded, outdoor amenity spaces from which users can feel, see and hear changes in the day, and not always find themselves hermetically sealed into highly-glazed, artificially-lit air-conditioned boxes.

2. ⁠More and better use of our existing buildings: less ‘slash and burn’ new development and greater use of what we already have. Discussions about embodied carbon are at their early stages in Hong Kong and there are huge gains (and huge carbon savings) to be made by refurbishing and retrofitting existing buildings.

3. ⁠More greening of our city’s buildings: amazingly, 70% of Hong Kong is green but the city and its streets remain hard and artificial. To encourage people to connect more with nature, to walk to work and to open the windows of our buildings we need to incorporate more greening on, in and over our buildings.

Louie Sieh

Researcher, Design as Governance

Louie is an urban researcher on how value is created through place governance. She has worked across university, government and private sectors in the UK, Hong Kong and ASEAN countries. Projects have dealt with: performance management for design quality in public services, specifically the operation of planning systems; the case for private sector investment in public design; the management of long term value in the built environment; project evaluation in placemaking. Louie has been Programme Director of three flagship built environment design programmes at Cardiff University and the City University of Hong Kong.

Louie’s current research is on decision-making and placemaking in Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Malaysia. Her most recent book is Providing Public Space in a Contemporary Metropolis: Dilemmas and Lessons from London and Hong Kong (2024, Policy Press), co-authored with Claudio de Magalhaes.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

Mainstream and enable co-design for the public realm, developing methods that are tailored for Hong Kong.

A public realm design approach that gives pedestrians greater priority than they currently have.

Confident and creative municipal leadership that takes, evidence-based, strategic, coordinated cross-bureau and departmental decisions to deliver public spaces fit for a world city.

Supported by

With thanks to