Commentary: <i>Insights into planning in three East-Asian cities</i>

The three essays under review provide interesting insights into planning praetiees in three East-Asian cities, two of which are capital cities (Beijing, Taipei) and one of which, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), is China's window to the world. In this brief commentary, I will focus on each city in turn, before concluding with an overall assessment of the state of planning in one of the most rapidly changing regions in Asia. Mee Kam Ng's case study is of the politics of waterfront planning in the SAR. The issue at hand is land reclamation along Hong Kong Island's northern edge facing Kowloon. Those who have visited there will remember it as a fascinating, densely built-up area, a district of spectacular architecture and great vibrancy. As a result of encroaching land uses on artificially reclaimed land, Victoria Harbour has shrunk by 60 per cent some say to the scale of a river - as this quasi city-state assumes its new role as the major financial and service centre in the South China region. Hong Kong's administrative status has allowed a more open, democratic society to evolve than is found on China's mainland. In 1995, two years before reunification, a non-governmental organization, the Society for the Protection of the Harbour Ltd, was formed to oppose further reclamation in the harbour area, and a Private Bill was introduced and passed in the Legislative Council (LegCo), further amended in 1999, that declared Victoria Harbour 'a special public asset and a natural heritage of Hong Kong people', concluding that, for this reason, 'there shall be a presumption against reclamation in the harbour'. When the planning bureaucracy nevertheless proceeded with plans for further landfills in the Central and VVanchai foreshore of Hong Kong Island, a law suit was brought that resulted in a clear judgment against the government, to the effect 'that reclamation cannot be justified unless it serves an overriding public need that is both compelling and present and cannot be accommodated by a reasonable alternative'. As a result, the plans for Wan Chai and other areas were sent back to the drawing board. Ng's essay relates the multi-stakeholder process that ensued, involving the Harbourfront Enhancement Committee (HEC). What would normally have been simply an engineering review of reclamation plans, looking for feasible alternatives that might require less encroachment upon the harbour while still accommodating bureaucratie priorities, turned into a drawn-out visioning process that included other 'imaginaries', with special attention to their impacts on local neighbourhoods. Alas, the HEC's powers, being only advisory, its recommendations were not mandatory upon the government. Ng concludes her study with thoughts on what she calls Hong Kong's two ruling rationalities the bureaucratic rationality of the Executive-led government and a formative rationality that 'comes from emerging political communities'. These two rationalities lead to very different visions of world-city formation. The first single mindedly pursues the goal of efficient economic growth, while the second seeks to promote livability and ecological sustainability as constraints on economic growth. Originating within civil society, the latter vision encompasses a greater variety of values than the first. Even so, the bureaucratic-corporate nexus remains dominant in Hong Kong and has so far failed to take the second rationality on board. Ng concludes her paper with the sage observation that the HEC experiment is a valuable one but still invites questions about the legitimacy and representativeness of the process and exposes the limits of communicative planning in a mode of governance with skewed power relationships. The story, of course, continues and, as stories are prone to do, may hold surprising twists and turns in the future. Chia-Huang Wang's paper presents us with a model for the study of world-city formation, using Taipci as its focus. …

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