The Story of Hong Kong – Review of her Infrastructure Developments and Strategies to meet a Sustainable Future

With the taking off of her economy from the beginning of 1970s’, Hong Kong has experienced a continual growth in GPD at averaged 8% per annum up till the outbreak of the economical crises that spread across the eastern part of Asia in 1998. As many developing cities or countries have been facing, the pace of development in infrastructure could easily be lapsed behind under such rapid expansion. This may result to the occurrence of a number of problems due to the demands, such as in transportation, housing, environment or other basic logistic support required by a modern city, cannot be instantaneously be met from such growth. If the worst come to the worst, it may depredate the urban quality, and the long term economic development may also be jeopardized. In view of this, the Government of Hong Kong in the past decades has invested multi-billions of dollars every year in the development of infrastructure facilities in order to keep Hong Kong to be a convenient, modern and competitive world-class city. These facilities include developments in the port and airport, railway, highway, new towns, and other strategic works that aim to improve the urban structure, environment and living condition of the entire territory. The purpose of this paper serves to provide a brief summary of what has been done in the past decades, and to review the strategies and coverage of these works in order to have an overall understanding of these developments in the meeting of Hong Kong’s future challenges.