How to Lose a Harbor

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hile 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 and cultural attractions. "Waterfronts are now cherished assets," says Marshall. According to a study by the Boston Foundation, the $21 billion, 20-year cleanup of Beantown's once dank harbor has created 47,000 jobs and attracted $8.4 billion in "present or planned" new investment. "We have a renaissance here," says Bruce Berman, spokesman for Boston's Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, the group that spearheaded the waterfront revitalization. "It has transformed the city and put us in a very competitive position." Hong Kong could reap similar rewards. A Designing Hong Kong Harbour study predicts that a vibrant Victoria Harbour with restaurants, cultural venues and marinas would create an estimated 50,000 jobs.

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 it." In 1997, in the waning days of British rule, the local Legislative Council passed the Harbour Protection Ordinance. The incoming postcolonial administration tried, but failed, to repeal the law, and in 2002 pressed ahead with a plan to build a mostly underground highway from Central to Causeway Bay through reclaimed land. Chu spent nearly $1 million of his own money on a legal challenge to the scheme, and in January 2004, the Court of Final Appeal struck down the government's ambitions. The judges deemed the waterfront "a natural heritage" to be trifled with only when there is "an overriding public need." Part of the land for that project has already been reclaimed, but the government is blocked from reclaiming the other 26 hectares.

Michael Suen, Hong Kong's Secretary of Housing, Planning and Lands, insists that he and his colleagues have got the message. "We know the harbor is our greatest asset," he stresses. But Suen says that somehow or other, a new 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 in 1996.

The key issue now is to find a method and a platform on which the new mood can be turned into real plans. Constant lawsuits—a staple of Hong Kong life as well established as reclamation—won't do the trick. "You can't design a city in a courthouse," says Zimmerman. "We have policy constipation," remarks Sun Hung Kai's Nissim.

In Hong Kong, few policies move without the backing of the business community, which is why the formation of the Harbour Business Forum is important. Business leaders don't want to take over all plans for the harbor. But the Forum has already settled on four broad areas in which it wants the Hong Kong government's performance to improve, and it will release the details next month. The Forum's report will call for a single, omniscient harbor authority, and transparency in the planning of projects. At the same time, the group says there should be a bias toward developing the harbor with public spaces, and that the 2004 court ruling banning nearly all reclamation should be respected. "The strength of feeling about the harbor has become conspicuous," says one of the participants at last week's meeting. "The business community should use its resources, its skills, its position in the community to move things forward. An improved harbor would be good for business."

Make that good, too, for lunchtime diners, intrepid swimmers, artists, cocktail kings—heck, everybody.