Urban Decay

Pit

y Hong Kong, for even as the city struggles in the face of regional and global economic forces, another, even more dreaded scourge casts Hong Kong's future in mortal and economic doubt. Cities evolve and prosper or wither and vanish just as individual species do. The causes of that urban selection are economic, geographical and biological, and an unlucky confluence of the three can lead to a Darwinian dead end. Herodotus already observed in the 5th century B.C. that "the cities that were formerly great, have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in olden times."

The history of man can be read as a litany of metropolises risen and fallen. The first major clusters of wealth, such as Babylon, Bactria, Nineveh, Persepolis, Samarkand and Thebes, were mostly located around the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers and along the Silk Road. With the rise of the seafaring Phoenician trading empire, prosperity and power shifted toward the Mediterranean Sea. At different times, this led to the emergence of Alexandria, Athens, Carthage, Constantinople, Rome and Tyre. And in the 15th century, it culminated in the first centers of capitalism: the Italian trading cities of Florence, Genoa, Pisa and Venice. Eventually, those cities were also overtaken by other, often more fortuitously situated and therefore more prosperous burgs.

But throughout history, cities became rich not only because of having favorable locations conducive to trade and proximate to skilled labor and abundant resources, which facilitated industrialization. Cities also required skilled administration, well-established legal and commercial infrastructure, low taxes and, most of all, religious tolerance and freedom—which attracted dynamic minority groups, along with artists, inventors, philosophers, scientists and teachers.

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Conversely, cities decayed because of internal and social strife, costly military campaigns to maintain trading empires or other commercial interests, protectionism, inability to adapt to changing economic conditions and intolerance toward minority groups, which encouraged merchant families or religious minorities to leave. And there has been another, frequently overlooked agent of urban decline: disease. For example, the Black Death, caused by the Pasteurella pestis, reappeared in Europe in 1346 when the port city of Kaffa was besieged by the Mongol leader Kipchak khan Janibeg, who catapulted dead bodies into the city (the first recorded case of biological warfare). The plague quickly spread to all Mediterranean port cities and European trading centers, reducing Europe's population by nearly 40% during the second half of the 14th century. The death toll was naturally far higher in densely populated trading ports, and it accelerated their economic decline.

Hong Kong at present suffers from both a structural shift in the world's economic geography and a plague, the virulence and duration of which is poorly understood. Following the breakdown of socialist and communist ideology in China and the Soviet Union, and the end of policies of self-reliance and isolation on the Indian subcontinent, the developed world's economic sphere has been enlarged by the same factor as during the great era of European exploration.More than 3 billion people have recently joined the global market economy. This means Hong Kong has new competitors, as do Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all of which benefited from China's isolation. In the same way that U.S. manufacturing shifted from the East Coast to the Great Lakes following the construction of canals and railroads in the 19th century, the world's productive, commercial and financial resources have relocated to China on a massive scale following that country's opening.

In addition to this ongoing change in the world's economic geography—and in part because of it—Hong Kong has now become a victim of biology. The planet's most fertile breeding ground for infectious diseases is located in southern China, just across the increasingly frictionless border with Hong Kong. It's not surprising that due to the SARS virus, which probably jumped from pigs to humans in Guangdong province, Hong Kong is now faced with its most serious crisis since the 1967 riots. Can the city survive both a SARS pandemic and increased competition from a large number of new commercial centers in China? These two outside shocks will probably reinforce Hong Kong's steady, relative decline.