Hong Kong is (famously) not a very democratic place, but, when it comes to things that do not matter very much to the government in Beijing, there can be a considerable amount of public discussion. A case in point is the West Kowloon Cultural District. This district sits on forty hectares of reclaimed land west of Kowloon proper. It was created in the 1990s as a byproduct of the construction of rail and road facilities that were needed to provide access to the new airport on Lantau Island. Some of the reclaimed land became the site of the Kowloon MTR Station; the 118-story International Commerce Centre; an enormous shopping mall; and an area of extremely tall residential buildings.
What to do with the reclaimed land immediately to the west of the Kowloon MTR station has been the object of a huge amount of public discussion over at least the last quarter century.
The West Kowloon Cultural Centre occupies the low-lying area in the left foreground. The largest completed building on the site (the building with blue cylinders on top) provides ventilation and offices for the Western Harbour Crossing tunnel. The tall building on the right is the International Commerce Centre, which sits on top of the Kowloon MTR station. The medium-tall dark-grey building in the right foreground is the M+ Museum, still under construction. The apartment buildings in the background run along coastal Kowloon and are some distance from West Kowloon. The photo was made from an elevated walkway near the Hong Kong-Macau Ferry Terminal, on Hong Kong Island.
Map of West Kowloon Cultural District and vicinity. The high-speed rail and subway lines—as well as parts of the road-tunnel approaches—are all underground. GIS data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve had to modify the data quite a lot.
The local government decided around the time of the Handover (1997) that it would be desirable to use much of the area for cultural facilities and parkland, both felt to be in short supply in Hong Kong. A major international competition was held to design the site. Norman Foster and Associates, which proposed building an enormous canopy over much of the area, won the contest in 2002, and there were serious discussions with foreign institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center about building starchitect-designed branches under the canopy. Many people were unhappy with this plan, however, partly because it would have been hugely expensive to implement, partly because there were doubts about the need for a special arts district, and partly because, well, there didn’t seem to be anything very distinctively “Hong Kong” about the Foster plan. Public discussion has been continuing ever since. Meanwhile, most of the site has usually been off limits, in part because most of its eastern half was needed for the construction of the underground high-speed railroad station for trains to and from the mainland that finally opened in 2018.
Eventually, a new competition was held for a new site design. This was won by Norman Foster + Partners in 2011.1 The Foster organization’s second plan was much more modest than its first one. It emphasized the building of parkland in the West Kowloon area and suggested a very slow development of the site.
Slow development is exactly what has happened. I’ve visited the area approximately once a year over the last decade, most recently last month, in December 2019. Before this last year, construction of the train station made it rather painful to get to West Kowloon, but it’s become a little easier now that the train station is open. You still have to take a circuitous route that requires trudging across an elaborate bridge that passes over the Western Harbour Crossing’s toll gates. (There is a small amount of parking, but few people in Hong Kong have access to a private car, and I certainly didn’t.)
Pedestrian access to the West Kowloon Cultural District over the last year has been via a complicated pedestrian bridge that crosses the toll gates of the Western Harbour Crossing road tunnel.
Much of the West Kowloon Cultural District remains a construction zone, but three buildings are open. A major venue, the Xiqu Theatre, sits at the extreme eastern end of the district. The M+ Museum—a contemporary visual-arts museum—has set up a tiny pavilion that it’s been using for short-term exhibits, mostly of Chinese art. Freespace, a performing-arts venue has also opened. Construction for the moment has focused on a large permanent home for the M+ Museum, and the Lyric Theatre, yet another venue, this one particularly for dance. A branch of Beijing’s Palace Museum—which will concentrate on traditional Chinese arts—is supposed to be under construction on the west side of the site soon. Several other arts facilities are projected.
The second Foster plan is labelled “City Park,” and it emphasizes parkland as much as buildings. A tiny section of the projected park at the extreme western end of the site opened a couple of years ago. It included a fragment of the projected West Kowloon Promenade, a walkway along the harborfront. The parkland and walkway have grown over the last year. The new parkland includes a substantial lawn. This hardly seems like a major accomplishment, but lowland Hong Kong is strikingly short of anything as unstructured as a lawn. The two largest older central-city parks—Victoria Park in Causeway Bay and Kowloon Park in Tsim Sha Tsui—are divided into a series of small spaces devoted to particular activities; they contain very little open space.2
In other words, in Hong Kong, West Kowloon’s lawn is an unusual feature.
On weekends the lawn area is quite well-used. Many people even bring tents.
Sunday afternoon in the West Kowloon Cultural District.
On weekdays, the hard-to-get-to West Kowloon park tends to be rather empty, but there’s a steady stream of runners and walkers making use of the Cultural District’s West Kowloon Promenade. There are very few places in lowland Hong Kong where you have such wonderful views almost to yourself.
The West Kowloon Promenade, West Kowloon Cultural District, late on a weekday morning.
The substantial space between the new lawn and the Xiqu Centre is still the site of construction and is essentially closed to the public (see map here). Eventually, a planned path along the harbor will surely end the isolation of the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Hong Kong, like many of the world’s great seaports, has been transforming what was once a busy, working port next to its central business district(s) into recreational space. This process has not been speedy anywhere, but, thanks in part to a slowdown necessitated by several years of public discussion, it seems to have been particularly slow in Hong Kong. One could argue about whether it makes any sense for governments to build special districts for the arts, but I can easily imagine that the completed Hong Kong Cultural District as a physical entity will be one of the world’s most thrilling urban spaces.
- The South China Morning Post, available online for much of the 21st century, has covered developments in the West Kowloon Cultural District in great detail. See, for example, Olga Wong and Vivienne Chow, “Second time lucky for Foster in West Kowloon arts hub,” South China Morning Post (5 March 2011). ↩
- There is a good deal of open space on reclaimed land near the Star Ferry terminal in Central, but the future use of most of this land has not yet been determined, and most of the area is now off limits, with the exception of a strip along the water, where a new coastal walkway (another “promenade”) between the Star Ferry Central Pier and the Hong Kong Convention and Exposition Centre has just opened. There is a small amount of adjoining parkland, but most of this area is used for the Central Harbourfront Event Space, open only to those paying to attend an event. ↩