EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Rural blight and land use planning in Hong Kong

C.Y. Jima
Additional contact information
C.Y. Jima: University of Hong Kong

Environment Systems and Decisions, 1997, vol. 17, issue 4, 269-281

Abstract: Abstract Reader in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Hong Kong. Despite the rapid urbanization of Hong Kong over the last few decades, until the late 1960s a serene countryside, contrasting with the bustling city close at hand, was left by default. Whereas many of the extra-urban hills have been designated as country parks, which guards them against development, the farmland and villages in the lowland have been intruded upon increasingly by non-conforming uses. The new-town programme initiated in the 1970s accelerated the rural degradation. Agricultural decline and urban-generated forces such as city expansion, land-value appreciation, port development, suburbanization and China trade provided the impetus. Urban-oriented activities, in particular open storage and port back-up, informal factories and village houses, began to encroach indiscriminately. A landmark court judgement in 1983 allowing such uses of farmland initiated a rampant spread and rural blight. The small rural realm has telescoped and accentuated the degradation. The policy of minimum interference in indigenous villagers' affairs accounted partly for the slow response. Belated statutory measures, introduced in 1991, ushered modern planning into the rural areas for the first time. The long-term policy aims at containing the proliferation, discontinuing uses at sensitive locations and opening sites and facilities for orderly accommodation of an inevitable urban overspill.

Keywords: Rapid Urbanization; Economic Geology; Urban Overspill; Sensitive Location; Open Storage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1018549327484 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:envsyd:v:17:y:1997:i:4:d:10.1023_a:1018549327484

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/10669

DOI: 10.1023/A:1018549327484

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment Systems and Decisions from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:envsyd:v:17:y:1997:i:4:d:10.1023_a:1018549327484