From City to Metropolis: Planning without Politics in Hong Kong
In a New York Times article on the “For-Profit City” of Próspera, Rachel Corbett situates this new techno-bureaucratic venture off the Honduran coast in relation to nearly 5,400 special economic zones throughout the world, one thousand of which have appeared in the last decade. Corbett writes that these zones vary from recently appeared “start-up cities” to the nearly 30 year-old “special administrative region (SAR) of Hong Kong.” Corbett’s comparison casts Hong Kong, whose colonial history dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, as a model for a more recent wave of efforts to spin a spatial imaginary for dense zones of activity—commercial, manufacturing, logistical, or residential—that may have once been called a city. Her evocation of the “SAR,” “start-ups” and “special economic zones” speaks to the role that naming plays in what Keller Easterling describes as “a scatter of incentivized urban forms.” Alongside nomenclature, another force working toward the imagination of these new zones are ready-made infrastructural networks for mobility and services. Indeed, infrastructure’s imposition through top-down planning acts similarly to nomenclature in abstracting the actual conditions of a site and its inhabitants. This abstraction is part of a strategy to extract the commercial and financial gain traditionally offered by cities, while skirting the problems—or the politics—associated with them. Thus, the zone, hub, node, etc. as an object of planning is increasingly an infrastructural kit of parts emptied of the contingencies of human exchange, material messiness or the agonism of political negotiation.
Figure 1. Hong Kong’s northern border facing Shenzhen, June 2023. Authors’ photo.
While Corbett cites Hong Kong as an exemplar of this kind of new tax haven, more recently the territory is undergoing an expansion that attempts to recast it in an image that goes well beyond that of its post-colonial heritage: more Hong Kong than Hong Kong in its set-apartness from what may have once been understood as a city. These efforts coincide with a new age marked by the rise of a Global China and the Guangdong, Macau, Hong Kong Greater Bay Area (GBA) in which the terms of the SAR’s original articulation—as special, as administered, and as a region—are themselves being transformed through the language of new urban forms. We look at the role of these articulations of Hong Kong’s status, particularly as they appeared in a foundational government document outlining plans for the “Northern Metropolis,” a future oriented development along the SAR’s northern border. We refer throughout to the English language version of the planning document, which also exists in traditional and simplified Chinese. While the spatial terms carry different cultural valence in Chinese than they do in English, the English text is significant for the way it implicitly communicates the local and national government’s vision—for Hong Kong, for the GBA with which it is increasingly identified, and for the Northern Metropolis—to a global audience.
We consider how the government’s ways of speaking about this planning project and its impact on Hong Kong enact an other-than-city spatial imaginary. We turn as well to the infrastructure’s role in giving shape and form to the various political and economic abstractions at the centre of today’s “for-profit” urbanization. Where infrastructure has come to be understood as the materialization of these abstractions through large-scale material emplacements, we propose that what is civic in a city depends on a recognition of infrastructure as a form of life that extends beyond physical networks.
The Making of a Metropolis
After the 2019 pro-democracy protests and during the protracted period of pandemic isolation in Hong Kong, government officials drafted numerous policies aimed at rebranding the city as an arts technology (“arts tech”) hub, a wealth management hub, a “green” finance center, and a gateway to China's sustainable development opportunities. The local government’s “hub obsession" has only grown in the wake of COVID-19, with Hong Kong being reimagined not as a city—with its own history and political life—but as a gateway, center, and hub of all things. These tropes are not in themselves new; many date back to Hong Kong’s colonial occupation as an entrepôt for British trade. Nevertheless, they have taken on new meaning over the twenty-seven years since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, arguably reducing Hong Kong to a function of the national economy, with its future seemingly scripted within the GBA.
At the centre of this political-economic project is the construction of the Northern Metropolis. Envisioned as “the new engine of Hong Kong's economic development,” the Northern Metropolis will cover 30,000 hectares of rural land along Hong Kong’s northern border with Shenzhen, subsuming wetlands, agricultural land, villages, and New Town Developments into a strategic configuration of industries, government services, and residential housing bound together by infrastructure (Figure 2). With its futuristic connotations and cinematic associations, “metropolis” is defined in the “Northern Metropolis Development Strategy" to carefully distinguish it from a city:
Metropolis does not refer to a region with statutory status or regime and administrative boundary. On the contrary, it is a large-scale and dynamic urban space which is formed by interactions among various factors including geographic characteristics, economic functions, ecological environment, transport connections, development policies, etc. A metropolis has multi-functional land uses interweaved [sic] in a compact pattern, with residential population, jobs and enterprises highly concentrated, and can drive economic development in its neighboring areas. It is lively and attractive with radiate [sic] effect, and its people usually live an enriched life in a unique spatial context with iconic nature, human and building landscape.
Figure 2. Site of the Northern Metropolis, with Shenzhen in the background and Hong Kong’s northern New Territories in the foreground. Northern Metropolis Development Strategy, October 2021.
As a “dynamic urban space” a metropolis is not a “place” with its connotations of history, origins and situatedness but rather is a function of the overlay and “interactions” of engineered, policy driven and economically oriented characteristics with geography and an “ecological environment.” The definition also distinguishes the Northern Metropolis from a “SAR” through its specification that “Metropolis does not refer to a region with statutory [special] status” or to the coincidence of that region with an “administrative boundary.” The counterpart to the Northern Metropolis in the planning document is the Harbour Metropolis, which includes the districts of Central and Tsim Sha Tsui on the two sides of Victoria Harbour. Renaming the most iconic and economically productive area of Hong Kong as the “Harbour Metropolis” dehistoricizes, depoliticizes, and diminishes its existence as a city—while refiguring attachments to what Hong Kong means—as a place, way of life, and geographical territory. This equation also calls into question the defining terms of the SAR, reducing its most central and vital districts to another metropolis no different from the development proposed for the north.
“The zone, hub, node, etc. as an object of planning is increasingly an infrastructural kit of parts emptied of the contingencies of human exchange, material messiness or the agonism of political negotiation.”
A Spatial imaginary: Hubs, Nodes, Centres, and Circles
Following China’s Fourteenth Five-year Plan, which promotes Hong Kong’s increased role in national development, the Northern Metropolis planning document reiterates this vision through a multitude of spatial terms. On the one hand, the Northern Metropolis will work to ensure that Hong Kong “will be an International I&T Hub,” an “international aviation hub,” and “a global offshore renminbi business hub.”[i] On the other, the creation of zones (the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Co-operation Zone) and circles (HK-Shenzhen Close Interaction Circle) will unite Hong Kong’s finance infrastructure with Shenzhen’s labor and technology manufacturing capacity to expand Hong Kong’s historic role as an international financial centre. Within these zones and circles, “nodes” indicate areas of intensified development, while “eco-nodes” designate areas where the mangrove and wetland ecosystems on either side of the border will be integrated and cultivated into a network spanning the GBA. The GBA itself is described as “an open platform for us to contribute to our country,” suggesting a paradoxical space where possibility is both boundless and carefully contained within an abstract spatial framework.[ii] This language of “hubs,” “nodes,” “centres,” “circles” and “platforms” can be quickly skimmed over as a historic by-product of planning discourses that has made its way through management jargon into the lingo of city-branding campaigns. The repetition and juxtaposition of these terms, nevertheless, works to recast a spatial imaginary for Hong Kong that foregrounds an economic and commercial logic and uses efficiency as a measure of value for nearly every realm of activity. Their scaleless and indeterminate nature—in contrast to the evocative and specific nature of city—speaks to the way they function as part of a larger whole, that whole being the economy of GBA and Greater China.
Connecting the hubs, circles, nodes, and centres that comprise the Northern Metropolis are infrastructures. These all-encompassing infrastructural plans intercede into a part of the SAR with an already existing administrative, historical, social and ecological identity. This site currently consists of two district administrative areas: the North District and Yuen Long District in the northern New Territories in Hong Kong. The North District lies along the Sham Chun River facing Shenzhen. It contains several border access points to Mainland China and is the least densely populated of Hong Kong’s 18 districts. The majority of its 300,000 residents live in Fanling-Sheung Shui New Town development housing estates, with a smaller portion of villagers living on inherited land protected under the Small House Policy established in 1972. Yuen Long encompasses a large number of historic villages, some dating back to the Qing dynasty. The district also contains the largest alluvial plain in Hong Kong and the internationally significant Mai Po Marshes, which serve as a stopping and feeding area for migratory birds. The Hong Kong Wetland Park was established in Yuen Long in 1998 as an ecological mitigation area intended to compensate for the wetlands lost due to Tin Shui Wai New Town development. In 2007, the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Western Corridor bridge was completed, becoming the fourth cross-border route between Hong Kong and Mainland China.
The spatial reimagining of the New Territories into the Northern Metropolis moves away from these historic ad-hoc connections toward a comprehensive reframing of an area rich in history and ecological import. This reframing takes place through a “From Two Bays, One River to Twin Cities, Three Circles” spatial model that is described as “ground-breaking in terms of the spatial concept” in that it “sets out clear directions for Hong Kong to closely co-operate with Shenzhen in various aspects, such as economy, infrastructure, people’s livelihood and ecological environment” (Figure 3).[iii] The “spatial concept” of “two bays, one river” inscribes a relationship between Hong Kong and Shenzhen that appears naturally ordained. The geometrical abstraction of “three circles” that evolves from this natural affinity evokes a political ideology of national unity. Through a dual process of naturalization and abstraction, the spatial imaginary works to engineer not only a more integrated economic interdependence between Hong Kong and Shenzhen but also a “New Mindset Breakthrough”[iv] in terms of how Hong Kong imagines its relationship to the Mainland.
Figure 3. “Two Cities, Three Circles” spatial imaginary for the Northern Metropolis. Northern Metropolis Development Strategy, October 2021.
This reframing is perhaps only made possible by a pattern in Hong Kong’s development history that treats the New Territories’ land as a resource to address a lack of housing within the SAR. The reframing also functions within a model of transit-oriented development that positions infrastructure—in the form of extensions to the Mass Transit Railway system (MTR) and the development of sites around stations by the MTR’s parent corporation—as a mechanism to expand the residential and commercial occupation of Hong Kong. What makes the Northern Metropolis unique, however, is the encompassing nature of its vision; this is not a New Town Development or single piece of infrastructure but a metropolis that promises to provide housing and quality of life, while achieving a seamless economic and cultural unity between Hong Kong and Mainland China.
The infrastructural links that spatially work to dissolve the boundary and abstract the territory form a central element of the shift “From Two Bays, One River to Twin Cities, Three Circles.” While the river will still exist, development on both sides will form a new singular spatial entity bound by infrastructural ties that will effectively make the previous demarcation ambiguous. As outlined in the 2023 Northern Metropolis Action Agenda, the infrastructure plans include thirteen new rail lines and highways connecting four zones–the High-end Professional Services and Logistics Hub, Innovation and Technology Zone, Boundary Commerce and Industry Zone and Blue and Green Recreation, Tourism and Conservation Circle (Figure 4). These mobility corridors and diagrams of spatial articulation imply the neat separating out of commercial activity from natural areas, and rehearses, at a more local scale, some of the abstracted spatial terms that elsewhere describe the entire Metropolis.
Figure 4. Demarcating Four Major Zones based on “strategic positioning and development themes.” The Northern Metropolis Action Agenda, 2023.
Ten “Action Directions” in Chapter 4 of the strategy document orient the transformation. Moving from west to east along the existing boundary, action directions 1-4 include maps overlaid with schematic indications for transportation lines. Action Direction 5 and 6 describe conservation, ecology and leisure in relation to their economic value, while Action Direction 7 addresses the “Home-Job Imbalance” of workers who commute long distances into the commercial districts of Hong Kong—or what would now be termed the Harbour Metropolis. Indeed, with Shenzhen connected to the Northern Metropolis by infrastructural links and new, more efficient border control technologies, jobs across the river in Mainland China would be as easily accessed as those within Hong Kong itself. Mirroring this integration is Action Direction 10, which proposes the establishment of satellite campuses of Hong Kong education institutions in the GBA.
Where these actions open an imaginary articulated through spatial abstractions and infrastructural emplacements, there is also a tentative acknowledgement of the people of this new metropolis. Action Direction 8 describes a “Government-led Community Making” mandate with a diverse responsibility for social inclusion, ecologically oriented “sponge-city” development, and the proliferation of community and cultural facilities. Social and ecological life is grouped together and put under the charge of this government authority. While the functioning of the government is not spelled out, Action Direction 9 speaks of “re-engineering” an “administrative mechanism and operation process” that would be responsible for the Metropolis’s planning, design and construction and of a “High-level Dedicated Government Institution of Northern Metropolis” overseeing everything from space planning and design to sustainable community development and tourism.
What is missing from this description of governance is any role for politics. Indeed, the suppression of the political life of Hong Kong would seem to go hand in hand with the city’s economic integration within the GBA. As then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam writes in her foreword to the Northern Metropolis planning document:
Under the excessive politicisation in councils together with opposition and resistance deliberately orchestrated by anti-government radicals in recent years, our town planning work has been obstructed. This seriously impeded our social and economic development and caused acute problems in our people’s livelihood. With the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law and improvement to our electoral system, chaos have [sic] ended and social order restored. Hong Kong is back on the right track of the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. We can focus on economic development and improvements to our people’s livelihood.[v]
In a post-NSL context, “social order” requires that politics be replaced with the efficiencies of economic development. While this has arguably always been the case in Hong Kong, under both British and Chinese rule, the period following the 1997 handover and the “one country, two system” model offered the potential for the democratic freedoms granted at the end of British rule to continue in the model for self-governance negotiated as part of the agreement.
The imagination of the Northern Metropolis spatializes and expands this evacuation of politics from Hong Kong: the High-level Dedicated Government Institution explicitly proposes a top-down, technocratic approach that makes no acknowledgement of the negotiations and contestations that comprise the civic. Governance is conceived as an infrastructure characterized by abstraction, distance, autonomy and authority. In a top-down fashion, the Hong Kong government wrote plans for the Northern Metropolis without soliciting the public for its opinions on the project. When it did conduct a poll, 80% of residents and organizations opposed the project, while a local body representing seven villages in the New Territories expressed concern over ancestral land rights. Indeed even this semblance of popular consultation now seems a vestige of the past. Local and international environment groups are particularly critical of the San Tin Technopole, an innovation and technology zone linking Hong Kong and Shenzhen (Figures 5a and 5b). Critiquing the government’s approach of “development first, conservation later,” the groups are urging city administrators to conduct environmental assessments on the site and “redraw the San Tin tech hub’s boundaries to avoid ecologically sensitive areas.”
“The Hong Kong government wrote plans for the Northern Metropolis without soliciting the public for its opinions on the project. When it did conduct a poll, 80% of residents and organizations opposed the project…”
Figure 5a. Site of San Tin Technopole, June 2023. Authors’ photo.
Figure 5b. San Tin Technopole as it’s envisioned in the Northern Metropolis Development Strategy.
These early responses to the project suggest that there has been little thought into how the social, natural and built environments will co-exist, co-evolve and inevitably exceed their imagined containment within the spatial imaginary of hubs, centres, nodes and circles or the infrastructural links that seemingly ensure their smooth operation. This lack of consideration extends both to those communities that exist already within the delimited terrain of the development and of those people who potentially make a home there afterwards.
Infrastructures from Below
While contemporary understandings of infrastructure have developed to include not only material emplacements that carry water, waste or energy, but also institutions and people that mediate exchange, this broader understanding is undermined when it holds on to a reading of infrastructure as a technical system distant and abstracted from everyday life. This distance is an explicit characteristic of the “High-level Dedicated Government Institution” that replaces a governance of political negotiation and exchange with the authority of dedicated expertise.
Broader understandings of infrastructure from the social sciences and humanities extend what counts as infrastructure—sewers, itinerant workers, hospitals, caregivers, cables—to question what infrastructure is and what kinds of relations it enables. As Brian Larkin writes, infrastructures are “semiotic and aesthetic vehicles” that address and constitute subjects and facilitate forms of life, desire and promise that emerge from and exceed infrastructures’ merely technical operations. There is another kind of politics here.
For AbdouMaliq Simone, the question “what is it that we can do together?” is largely a question of infrastructure: the material in-betweenness facilitating the interchange of goods, people, information, and meaning. He points out, “While infrastructure attempts to suture, articulate, or circumvent, its proficiency of engineering, substance of investment, or institutional support does not guarantee that it will accomplish what it sets out to do.” The stability that infrastructures strive to accomplish, he adds, “still depends on the messy earthly and social actions that infrastructure provides sufficient definition for.” Infrastructures thus include people and relations between them, particularly those living on the margins of cities and outside official conduits of infrastructural distribution, and comprise a “complex surrounds”—a setting or situation within which exists the possibilities for something unexpected to happen. The surrounds involves an unsettling, rather than a stabilization, of urban space.
Alongside Simone’s understanding of infrastructure as those unanticipated activities that take place despite planning’s attempts to predict and contain the “use” of urban space, Lauren Berlant theorizes infrastructure as the movements within relations. They write, “Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure.” Infrastructures, in this sense, are the affective and material relations through which the world maintains its consistency and by which we maintain our attachments to the world and to each other. Importantly, for Berlant, infrastructures are what enable people to negotiate “the friction of collaborative life.”[vi]
These frictions form a necessary component of civic life and are precisely what the centres, hubs, and circles of the Northern Metropolis exclude. If “institutions enclose and congeal power, resources, and interests and represent their legitimacy as something solid and enduring,” infrastructures constitute “the habits, patterns, norms, and scenes of assemblage and use.”[vii] Far from fixed points on a grid of geometrical arrangements, infrastructures are the malleable patterns of association, movement, and relation that hold together lives and worlds, and they can be reconfigured otherwise.
Moving toward these more capacious recognitions of infrastructure is relevant not only as a tool for describing what is on the ground every day in the lives of cities, but also, potentially, in that moment of imagination when planners and policy makers establish its articulatory terms. How this takes place, how spatial imaginations can begin with an infrastructure from below that opens a space for contingency and negotiation, is then a challenge for planning.
The Northern Metropolis remains, at this point, a fantasy space, where an abstract spatial geometry gives order to social life and where civic life is scripted by a technocratic bureaucracy that creates community around market principles of innovation, optimisation, productivity and convenience. City administrators, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, are reimagining urban environments in ways that eliminate the inefficiencies of politics, smooth away the frictions of the social, and reduce nonhuman forms of life to the scenic backdrop of sustainable development. And yet as more and more sustainable and smart city projects fail, it is becoming clear that the slowness of democratic practices and the world-making power of nonhuman life forms are integral to the life of a city. Although Hong Kong has, from its beginnings, served primarily as an international marketplace, a city has managed to flourish in the interstices of its economic flows. Its continued flourishing will have little to do with the economic rationalism, or spatial and infrastructural abstractions envisioned in the Northern Metropolis project. While the plans for the Northern Metropolis evade the messier forms of urban life with a language centres, hubs, nodes, and circles, inevitably it will be the unplanned forms of civic participation and diverse forms of life that will support its social, political, and ecological thriving.
Citation
Sony Devabhaktuni and Joanna Mansbridge. “From City to Metropolis: Planning without Politics in Hong Kong,” PLATFORM, Jan 20, 2025.
Notes
[i] "Northern Metropolis Development Strategy" (PDF). policyaddress.gov.hk. 2021-10-06, 17.
[ii] "Northern Metropolis Development Strategy" (PDF). policyaddress.gov.hk. 2021-10-06, 3.
[iii] "Northern Metropolis Development Strategy", 15.
[iv] "Northern Metropolis Development Strategy", 14.
[v] "Northern Metropolis Development Strategy", 1. Lam is referring here to the opposition posed by pan-democrats in the Legislative Council, and more specifically, to an unofficial district council election primary organized in July 2020, just one month after the national security law was passed. In January 2021, 47 opposition figures, including former legislators, social workers, academics, LGTBQ activists, and environmentalists, were officially charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the NSL. In November 2024, 45 of the 47 were sentenced to up to 10 years in jail.
[vi] Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 7.
[vii] Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, 95.
