Kowloon East regeneration featured in exhibition at Venice Biennale
Kowloon East - warts and all - is under the microscope as part of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale
Kowloon East steps on to the world stage in Venice today, when Hong Kong's attempts to redevelop the area are put on display at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition, part of the Italian city's biennale festival.
On show will be the government's masterplan to redevelop the 320 hectares of the Kai Tak Development and the 168 hectares of Kwun Tong and Kowloon Bay, turning it into another central business district saturated with shiny skyscrapers filled with more offices, more shops and more tourism facilities.
But the exhibition also asks the question: what went wrong in Hong Kong?
According to Christopher Law Kin-chung, chief curator of Inter Cities/Intra Cities: Ghostwriting the Future, the Hong Kong exhibition serving as part of the biennale's collateral events: "Hong Kong had this great advantage of being diverse. Large corporations and grass-roots shops could stay together in a harmonious way. But Hong Kong is becoming very homogenous, and you can see this in many districts, where public spaces are controlled by commercial properties.
"How can we preserve diversity and compatibility as well as Hong Kong's pluralistic nature under globalisation and modernisation? The planning for the development of Hong Kong has been too scientific. There's always this oversimplification of society, which is governed by logic and science. But cities aren't that simple."
The Hong Kong exhibition features 17 projects by 14 exhibitors dealing with the Kowloon East redevelopment, exploring the issues of diversity and compatibility in response to "Common Ground", the theme of this year's biennale, which was decided by the biennale's chief curator, David Chipperfield.
