Word: kowloon
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...flyers fingering their rosaries?they were all built on reclaimed land. One hundred and sixty years of hauling landfill from mountainsides and construction dumps and shoveling it into the water has left Hong Kong with a harbor that, between the Central business district and Tsim Sha Tsui on the Kowloon side, is now just about 1 km wide?shorter than the span of New York's George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. Visitors to Hong Kong who arrive in town expecting an easily accessible, vibrant waterfront like the ones in Sydney or Baltimore are in for a rude surprise...
...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 and for all, what it wants to do with its most valuable resource...
...highway has to be built. "The overriding need is the road," he says, while pledging that most of the land above it will be used for parks and promenades. Activists, however, have heard such claims before. Chu asks, "Who can trust the government?" and notes that the planned West Kowloon cultural district, will, if completed, offer millions of square meters of commercial and residential space?but it was zoned as a park when the land was first reclaimed...
...What are the challenges facing Tsang? The biggest is the growing demand in Hong Kong for greater democracy, which often manifests itself in the form of mass street protests. The public will also carefully watch what Tsang does regarding the city's West Kowloon Cultural District, a huge real estate project that has drawn accusations of collusion between the government and Big Business. Then there's the state of the harbor, Hong Kong's most precious natural resource; air pollution; worsening traffic; conservation; the widening wealth gap?in short, everything you'd expect from the educated and cosmopolitan society Hong...
...Maybe it's just become more aware. "This is what happens when a society matures," says Nick Brooke, a local property consultant and past president of Britain's Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. On a recent Sunday, 11-year-old Matthew Tse visited the West Kowloon exhibition with his parents and grandmother. "I like this plan," he said, pointing at one of the three models. "It has the lowest plot ratio...