The land resource and landuse of Hong Kong

Abstract

The urban development is a decisive factor for the landuse of the territory of Hong Kong, as a realm of a world city. A speed-up change of the landuse structure of Hong Kong and some contradictions in the landuse have been revealed after a brief mentioning of the characteristics of the limited land resources of Hong Kong. Hong Kong consists of peninsula and islands dominated by hilly terrain in south subtropical zone, 84% of the total area is slope, unfavorable for urban and agricultural development, only 16% is small plains. The land is barren and water resource is very limited. Urban landuse is taken as the dominant factor. Due to the expansion of the scale of the urban development, and the limitation of the land resource, there is a high degree of the urban land utilization, but the proportions of commercial and industrial landuse are not high, only 1.3% of the total developed land is used for commerce, 6.0% for manufacture industries, the road and railway lands amount to 14.6%. The great efforts were made in reclamation and construction of reservoirs in order to add land and water resources. The arable lands were reduced heavily and the farmlands were wasted seriously. The author proposed some view points on the present and future landuse in Hong Kong as follows: 1) the urban landuse remains as a guiding factor in the landuse of the whole territory of Hong Kong; 2) one of the problems is the fondness for the reconstruction of the old city, loosening up on the new town development; 3) the reclamation is not only very costly, but also causing some negative effects on the eco-environment; 4) the problem of the protection of the farmlands against wasting should be seriously; 5) the development and the landuse for the construction in Hong Kong should be considered with the relationship with the inland, especially Guangdong Province; 6) fully use the convenient condition of the territorial linkage of the city with the mainland, further to bring the role of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone into fully play for solving the landuse problems in the development of Hong Kong.