Word: harbored
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...after years of despoiling its very name?Hong Kong means "fragrant harbor" in Chinese?things may finally be about to change. An unlikely coalition of environmental activists, business leaders and (this being Hong Kong) property developers is pushing for a rethink of how to make the harbor something more than an international embarrassment. Last week, about 70 executives from more than 90 of the city's biggest companies and institutions quietly assembled on the 40th floor of the HSBC headquarters?the very heart of the territory's traditional business community?for the first meeting of a new body, the Harbour...
...business leaders' timing could not be better. Two major plans for the harbor are now in limbo, having been subject to a barrage of legal and popular complaints. A planned 26-hectare reclamation in Wanchai?whose principal purpose was for a highway?was halted last year by a court challenge. And proposals for an ambitious arts district on reclaimed land in West Kowloon have been frozen by public protests over the government's intention to hand the $6.8 billion project to a single developer. In this enforced breathing space, Hong Kong has a rare opportunity to figure out, once...
...Kong. The narrow band of land squeezed between the water and the hills of Hong Kong island was always too small to nourish the territory's ambitions. But the development of the city's waterfront has been both relentless and uncoordinated. Hong Kong has no central planning for the harbor: its use and misuse are dictated by more than a dozen competing government departments and covered by at least 15 separate zoning plans. Hong Kong's "relationship with the waterfront was always an awkward thing," says Richard Marshall, an urban design director for the planning firm EDAW...
...While Hong Kong's government was milking the harbor as a tax cow, it missed what was happening elsewhere in the world. As shipping moved from downtown wharves to purpose-built container ports, old cities discovered that their weedy waterfronts could be reworked into the sort of environments that would attract?and retain?both tourist dollars and the creative minds that give a place fizz. From Boston to Bilbao, from Singapore to Sydney?even, for heaven's sake, in Liverpool, the ultimate rusted-up port?city planners have remade harbors into lively, people-friendly places full of restaurants, design studios...
...Over the past few years, the realization that Hong Kong, too, can do something with its harbor has begun to sink into the city's consciousness. Winston Chu, 65, remembers taking girlfriends for evening strolls along the harbor in the 1960s. Forty years later, Chu collected tens of thousands of signatures for a law banning most harbor reclamation works. One of his inspirations was his 90-year-old mother, Cissy, who invited him up to her harbor-view penthouse garden in 1995 and, pointing to the shrinking waterway, "gave me a scolding and instructed me to do something about...