ABSTRACT
Harbour: the latter was part of a 2 kilometres wide strategic shipping channel that separated Hong Kong Island from a small promontory on the Chinese mainland known as Kowloon Peninsula.
In 1861, two decades after settlement of the Island, Britain acquired about 9 square kilometres of the Peninsula plus near-by Stonecutter Island. Much later, in 1897, it extended its jurisdiction to a larger and less regular projecting land mass to the south of the Sham Chun River – to be known as ‘the New Territories’. From the tip of the Peninsula grew the City of Kowloon, shorter and broader than Victoria but with time no less dense. Its name was derived from the Chinese Kau Lung, meaning ‘Nine Dragons’, which referred to the peaks rising immediately beyond Britain’s 1861 acquisition. Beyond Kowloon and its immediate extensions, a series of tall, small footprint ‘new towns’ was planned that today reach for the skies from mostly rail-side sites in the New Territories. Individually and collectively, Victoria, Kowloon and the new towns constitute forms of urbanism unlike any other places on earth with specific consequences for living, working, travel and relationships with nature. This chapter (and the next two) will explore these forms, their components, dominant typologies and relationships.
