Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: The harbour city of Hong Kong is a very circumscribed territory which, with 6.7 million residents, has one of the highest urban densities in the world 1 .Indeed, a forest of towers standing against the mountain is the image that comes to mind to describe the urban landscape developed there in the post-war period.Office and residential towers are, after all, the most common type of architecture, by virtue of the valuable ratio they offer in terms of construction volume to land occupied. 2The extreme characteristics of Hong Kong immediately signal a metropolis whose transport systems have to contend with major constraints.The management of huge volumes of traffic, the need to get a return out of scarce and expensive land, and the weight of excessive centralisation have, over the past three decades, led the Hong Kong government to rethink the accessibility of its space.This complex situation, albeit one that is also a source of value added, has become of vital concern for any metropolis wishing to maintain its position as one of the world's great cities.The economic reputation and wealth of Hong Kong are derived, after all, from its global commercial exchanges and from the service sector, which alone represents 89% of its current GDP.The originality and effectiveness of the government's plans are a function of the interaction of several different levels.In Hong Kong, the modernisation of transport networks presupposes control over traffic flow at the local, regional and of course global levels all at once.In particular, we must bear in mind the fact that tourism, Hong Kong, An Urban Future Shaped by Rail Transport China
Source: China Perspectives
Author: Corinne Tiry
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1521114949