Dynamics of the central business district of Hong Kong

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai-san Wan
Author(s):  
Ken Nicolson

Case study 6: Dried Seafood Street is a popular commercial neighbourhood, specialising in selling a wide variety of dried seafood, tea, and herbal goods. Close to Hong Kong’s central business district and served by the iconic tramline, the cultural landscape comprises several blocks of colourful, bustling shops with distinctive sights, sounds, and smells. Historic urban districts in Hong Kong are vulnerable because land is scarce, property values are high, and the usual consequence of such economic forces is eventual loss of heritage sites to new development. However, for over a century the dried seafood businesses have survived several phases of urban renewal thanks to the Nam Pak Hong Association, a traders’ organisation, which has provided a degree of cohesion and stability that other commercial districts lack. The importance of conserving both the hardware and software of heritage sites is discussed. In the absence of conservation tools in Hong Kong to protect heritage urban cultural landscapes like Dried Seafood Street, land use zoning and financial incentives used elsewhere in Macau and Singapore are reviewed for comparison.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 4867
Author(s):  
Yunxi Bai ◽  
Jusheng Song ◽  
Shanshan Wu ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Jacqueline T. Y. Lo ◽  
...  

In recent years, environmentally-friendly, sustainable, and compact development has become increasingly popular with governments. An extensive body of literature has focused on the influence on housing prices from an economic perspective. Although residential urban planning from the perspective of individual needs must be considered, little attention has been paid to residents’ demands in high-density and compact urban areas. In this study, we selected Hong Kong as the case and adopted a reliability interval method to rank residential attitude metrics, which indicated residents’ neighborhood needs in densely populated cities. The influences of location attributes on residents’ demands and residential value were compared. A hedonic price model was used to estimate the impacts of the attributes on housing prices. The results showed that both access to metro stations and median household income had important influences on residents’ preferences and housing prices. However, access to the central business district contributed largely to housing prices but not to residents’ attitudes. These findings support urban planners and policy makers during sustainable residential planning and policy formation by understanding residents’ needs in compact urban areas, help them to optimize the match between housing attributes and residents’ expectations, and balance the relationship between residents’ needs and economic interest.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao-Ming Hu ◽  
Ming Xue ◽  
Petra M. Klein ◽  
Bradley G. Illston ◽  
Sheng Chen

AbstractMany studies have investigated urban heat island (UHI) intensity for cities around the world, which is normally quantified as the temperature difference between urban location(s) and rural location(s). A few open questions still remain regarding the UHI, such as the spatial distribution of UHI intensity, temporal (including diurnal and seasonal) variation of UHI intensity, and the UHI formation mechanism. A dense network of atmospheric monitoring sites, known as the Oklahoma City (OKC) Micronet (OKCNET), was deployed in 2008 across the OKC metropolitan area. This study analyzes data from OKCNET in 2009 and 2010 to investigate OKC UHI at a subcity spatial scale for the first time. The UHI intensity exhibited large spatial variations over OKC. During both daytime and nighttime, the strongest UHI intensity is mostly confined around the central business district where land surface roughness is the highest in the OKC metropolitan area. These results do not support the roughness warming theory to explain the air temperature UHI in OKC. The UHI intensity of OKC increased prominently around the early evening transition (EET) and stayed at a fairly constant level throughout the night. The physical processes during the EET play a critical role in determining the nocturnal UHI intensity. The near-surface rural temperature inversion strength was a good indicator for nocturnal UHI intensity. As a consequence of the relatively weak near-surface rural inversion, the strongest nocturnal UHI in OKC was less likely to occur in summer. Other meteorological factors (e.g., wind speed and cloud) can affect the stability/depth of the nighttime boundary layer and can thus modulate nocturnal UHI intensity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document