Treating the Symptoms - A Critical Review of ... - Civic Exchange

According to town planner Ian Brownlee, the vast majority of building rehabilitations are doneby the private sector without any assistance from the URA, such as this gentrified building inSoHo.PreservationThe challenge for the URA has been to find a way to carry out historical preservation withinthe constraints of a commercial business strategy. The URA Ordinance did not create anyspecific mechanisms for conducting preservation, and the URA is offered little support byHong Kong’s existing policies and legislation.108Hong Kong only gives legal protection to declared monuments (currently 84); its system oflisting other historical structures by the Antiquities and Monuments Office is non-statutoryand confers no legal protection. There are essentially no formalized systems of compensationor subsidies for the preservation of listed buildings (except for declared monuments), whichgives private owners no financial incentive to preserve them. 201 If the government wishes topreserve a building, it usually buys it. There are obvious disadvantages to this strategy becausethe government becomes responsible for maintaining and finding uses for it. Since February2008, the government has tried to recruit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to takeon government-owned historical buildings. 202 Finally, Hong Kong’s preservation legislationfocuses only on individual buildings, and not on neighbourhoods or districts. Only veryrecently has the Development Bureau begun to consider district-wide preservation at anadministrative level for old parts of Wan Chai. 203It is within this context that the URA has been charged with preserving structures of historicaland cultural interest. This means that it has had to find ways to make historical preservationcommercially viable, or to subsidize it with profits from redevelopment. One strategy it haspursued is to bundle preservation with redevelopment projects, so that a few buildings areselected for preservation within a wider scheme of redevelopment. The URA has also takenon a few pure preservation projects, subsidized out of its surpluses.In both cases, the usual policy is for the URA to resume the properties from their existingowners. They are then restored and rented out to commercial tenants. A full list of the URA’scompleted and proposed heritage projects can be found in Appendix 2.