Hong Kong is famous for its easy accessibility to nature and the compactness of its urban space, not for the rising number of high-rise buildings which look more like toothpicks or clamping candles with little sense of aesthetics. Worse still, under the profit maximization drive of real-estate developers, the high-rise buildings are like walls blocking the harbor (which means more units with sea view to fetch higher sale prices) and the movement of air currents along streets. The latter has made the city center something of a living hell with bad air quality.

Hong Kong is and should remain a compact city. Population density in the city center is high and we need a vertical city. The fact the city's buildings have become taller is not a natural or logical result. Singapore has less land yet its city planning is more eco-friendly and livable than ours. It also has tall buildings, mostly for commercial not residential use, and its rapid increase in population to more than 5 million has not affected its neighborhoods. To balance compactness and environment the key lies in urban planning including architectural design. Hong Kong's new town projects of the 1950s and 60s created some very livable township communities, although unfortunately the profit drive for urban renewal is replacing them with gentrification of the worst kind.

The wall-like building style of greedy real-estate companies should be ruled out by strict government regulation, and the height of buildings should be limited, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also for energy saving and carbon emission reduction. The government should not just be controlled by plot ratio; it should also lay down certain rules on architectural style - such as better use of natural light and natural ventilation, borrowing from the traditional Chinese wisdom of feng shui which emphasizes the adherence of housing location and built forms to the local micro-climate of sunlight, wind and water. The government has mapped the patterns of air currents in the urban districts with the help of academia, and the findings should be used to create architectural and design constraints for buildings in different districts. This will preserve the air flows that breathe fresh air into local communities and disperse the exhaust from cars.

The city centers have too few green patches and even the city of Guangzhou has planted and preserved more greenery in the busiest areas than Hong Kong. An easy solution is to have vertical gardens, which have become technically feasible and fashionable. Rooftops of buildings could be used for gardening or for vegetable gardening to produce organic food. The costs of these rooftop gardens are affordable to owners and tenants of the buildings.

Transport investment in Hong Kong should shift from building ever more roads to more aggressive development of railways and subways. Hong Kong has plans that are endlessly deliberated without any commitment from the government. Guangzhou is modeling its inner-city railway development after Tokyo and Paris and is completing the job efficiently and effectively. Hong Kong should not be a laggard in this area, in which it once held advantage over all cities on the mainland and even most of Asia. The expansive building of the railway system will help create new towns to reduce the density pressure on the city centers and the ever-worsening air quality problems there.

There is also a revival of millennium-old practices of developing underground space in the city center for a whole district and/or for individual buildings. There are huge areas even in Central and Kowloon, or under the racecourse in Happy Valley, with the potential to be developed into underground cities to enhance the value and use of the above-ground business and public spaces.

Hong Kong needs to innovate and renovate to make itself once again Asia's World City, one that is economically vibrant, ecologically friendly and most importantly, livable for its residents and overseas businessmen and visitors.

The author is director of the Public Policy Research Institute and head of China Business Center at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

(HK Edition 10/23/2013 page7)