Innovative_Green_Living_Initiatives_to_Transform_Hong_Kong_Into_a_“Green_Metropolis”

Innovative Green Living Initiatives to Transform Hong Kong into a “Green Metropolis” The global population has experienced continuous growth since the disappearance of Black Death in around 1400 . The rate of increasing is even higher than before. The urban population has been raising and will reach 50% in a few decades and demand for land for accommodation and industrial production keeps get bigger and bigger, the exploitation of natural environment and the consumption of resources become much more serious than ever. There is an urgent need to maintain a long term balance between natures and people’s needs. Now what the environmentalists are trying to achieve is to preserve the remaining natural environment and to minimize the human impact to the exploited area. The most suitable solution at present time is compact development. Compact development is only a direction guiding the way of development but not a standard providing condition for developers to fulfill. It hopes to increase urban population densities by accommodating more people in an area, to develop mixed-land uses, to concentrate job opportunities, to invest in mass transit system and discourage people from using private cars. Such concept would like to not only reduce the carbon consumption of the area and hence to maintain sustainability, but also to improve the living condition of urban population through allowing resident to enjoy greater amount of green area, to have cleaner air since less automobiles are used in the area and to improve the current using technology. However, until now there is no clear example on how compact development should or could be. Yet, Sha Tin is a very good choice to apply compact development in its new town development. It is because of some reasons: firstly, Hong Kong has very little flat land for urban development and most population are concentrated in around 20% of total area of Hong Kong. Sha Tin is a new town that has population over 600,000. Secondly, the natural environment has high ecological value that needs to be preserved. This reduces the amount of land available for urban expansion. Sha Tin is surrounded by the Lion Rock, Kam Shan and Shing Mun River that limited the expansion; therefore it can serve as an example for other urban cities. The present infrastructure of Sha Tin is also a good condition for compact development. For transportation, there is railway connecting Sha Tin with Kowloon and people can travel to other districts in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island in less than an hour. There are also around 20 bus routes available in the bus terminal in New Town Plaza and another 15 bus and minibus routes in the bus terminal next to the Sha Tin railway station. The connectivity of the mass transit system in Sha Tin is well established. For recreation, there is swimming pool, indoor and outdoor basketball courts, several football fields and a sports ground which are all easily accessible from Sha Tin town center. Apart from the sports facilities, there are two libraries, a town hall and several community service centers. Besides, all shopping malls are linked together and form a world-unique shopping corridor which enables people to walk for a long distance. All in all, Sha Tin contains some of the important infrastructure for compact development. There are some parts that are needed to be improved in Sha Tin. The excess supply of car park drives the parking fee too low that cannot discourage people not to have their own cars. For example, in Sha Tin Town Center, almost every shopping mall has its own car park and some of the car park fees are only about $5 per hour on weekday. It absolutely raises the incentive of owning a private car of the residents there. If we want to discourage people to drive their own car, especially on weekdays, we have to reduce the number of car parks or risen the parking fee until the cost of driving their own car is much higher than taking the public transport since people will notice that driving the private car is no longer economical. Besides, enlarging the coverage of public transport like increasing the bus routes and the number of runs of scheduled transport may help discouraging people driving their private cars. Although Sha Tin is highly accessible, there are only few places where public transportation is unable to access directly, such as Central, people may tend to drive there by themselves instead of transiting different transport. Because of this reason, if the bus routes can cover more areas, the tendency of taking public transport of residents in Sha Tin will increase. At the same time, if the frequency of runs of scheduled transport can be added, the waiting time will drop and results as an attraction to the public. On the other sides, there are not enough relevant facilities to support people to bike. Firstly, there is insufficient space for people to park their bicycles. Since cycling is not such popular in Sha Tin as people usually drive or take public transport for daily commuting instead of riding bicycle, bicycle parking is rarely provided, even if there are, they are still limited. Moreover, since the bicycle lane is designed for leisure but not for daily commuters so that people find it very difficult to use bicycle to get to their work place. In fact, the bicycle lanes are disconnected to the residential buildings or most of the shopping malls, except Hilton Plaza. Although they choose bicycles as the means of transportation, they cannot access to their destination directly and finally have to take other transportation. As a result, the inconvenient of cycling will discourage people to bike. So if we would like to enhance the compact development in Sha Tin, widen and added more cycling paths is one of the suitable means. To achieve the aims, we can change some sidewalks which are rarely be used or be replaced by bridges of the shopping malls. As we mentioned before, one of the features of Sha Tin’s shopping mall is all shopping malls are linked together and form a world-unique shopping corridor, it leads to a condition that people go across different shopping malls through bridges instead of the ground traffic system. If the utility rate of those sidewalks is low, we can consider changing them into cycling lane and it helps encourage people to travel by cycling. To support cycling, increasing bicycle parking area is essential. When cycling becomes more popular, the demand of parking will rapidly increase, especially around the transport intersection areas, such as Sha Tin MTR station. Thanks to scarce land supply in Hong Kong, it is difficult to mark off lots of land areas for parking bicycles, we can adopt the “Double deck parking of bicycle” system which is used in Beijing. This system allows a double amount of bicycle to park in a particular area and it is what exactly Hong Kong needs. Moreover, since there are too many car parks in Sha Tin Town Centre, it is possible to introduce bicycle parking area in those car parks which can reduce the number of car parking area and discourage people to drive their own car at the same time. Also, there are not enough places for social interaction. Despite there are different types of facilities which used for recreation, such as Town Hall, most of them are not free of charge or the opening time is limited. As a result, public are unable to enjoy the places for social interaction. On the other hand, some open-to-public areas have insufficient advertisement so that people do not even know they can utilize those areas. Such as the platforms of the residential building, actually, most people do not know that those platforms should be opened for public but deems that only open for the residents. In the event, the utility rate of the platforms is obviously low. For compact development, public should enjoy more green area since their living environment is becoming more and more compact and those green area can help balance their daily lives. Therefore, we should work now to improve the platforms’ environment. Firstly, we have to encourage people to utilize platforms through government’s advertising or the authorities of the real estates. Also, we can green the platforms using green roof concept so as to attract more people to stay there. Greening the platforms can help absorbing greenhouse gases which are produced nearby and can help filtrating the air too. When it comes to development, improving people’s living condition and environment protection, the role of government is crucial. In order to facilitate compact development in Sha Tin, the government can implement different policies to help. To start with, the government can set up restriction on building design to control the size of apartments, the spaces between buildings and to reduce the grant gross floor area concession of car parks. All of the above can prevent various pollution problems that are caused by overcrowded living area, namely, the accumulation of exhausted air from automobiles running in the area. To further improve the living environment, congestion pricing can be applied in the city center during rush hour. Through such market incentive, the use of vehicles will decrease so as the air quality in the area. Moreover, the government can urge the property management companies to open the public as written on the deed. This way allows people to enjoy the right that they are entitled to. The value of the properties can be increased by improving the green area on the platforms as well as the health of the residents. To do so, the government can provide knowledge on what and how should be planted to the management companies or held campaign to call for residents to work together to build a greener and better environment that they invest and live in. To promote using bicycles instead of automobiles, the government can start to build widened and covered bike lane and also tunnels to make riding more pleasurable in daily commuting. On top of this, the bicycle lane network should be improved. Through allowing bikers access most of the places, the motivation of riding will raise and the demand for automobiles will drop in return. As the city is more compact, recycling and waste treatment in a larger scale is now feasible. Integrated recycling center can be set up in the peripheral area so as to reduce the burden of the landfills and to create job opportunities in the district which can meet the basic assumption of compact development. Since the amount of waste produced every day is greater, putting one incinerator in each district is possible and efficiency can also be maintained. The waste produced can be taken care of in the place that it is produced as proximity principle suggested. Apart from city center, the peripheral of the area needs attention too. The government can apply premium on the land price to control the land use in case of developers want to start another huge residential project which may increase the use of private cars and disturb the system in the town center. To cope with the present situation where there are some public housing estates across the river, the use of mini buses which run on LPG or even electrical cars can be used as the major mode of transportation for the residents. To sum up, compact development is the perfect and sustainable solution for future development to meet the needs for growing population. It is not a standard of achievement but a guide line for the path ahead. It could be a universal direction of development to strive for a balance between natures and urban. Yet, it requires cooperation of different parties to make it real and applicable.