Recently I am doing my final year project about heritage conservation in Hong Kong. It is a hot topic since last year when the government determined to remove the Star Ferry pier in Central. Protests broke out to preserve the old pier when I was in Australia, but bulldozers finally started working and the pier with lots of memory was removed.
People talk about collective memory since then.
How much memory do we have in Hong Kong? What is collective memory? The government immediately reacted by putting the term into the heritage grading system, which is used to define whether an architecture should be a heritage. People complained the slow response of the government and its temporization of just putting the term into the system. This is quite confusing since the government tried to do something at once, and then the people criticized the government for doing things so rushed and seemingly without a thorough consideration. The government can hardly play a good game in this issue.
There are many problems in heritage conservation. More than half of the graded heritage are owned by private parties, which makes the situation complicated. The structure of some heritage is in danger that can hardly be approved to be preserved. It involved a huge amount of money to conserve the heritage, which the government does not show an interest to spend the money for that. The government noted that all decisions were up to the public, but sometimes it was said to be misleading as the government does not show the whole picture for people's understanding. The process of assessing the historical buildings is not transparent and accountable.
On the other hand, the public does not look very responsible to me. The government did a number of things to raise the public concern. In 2004, a consultation about heritage conservation was done to collect people's opinions. The feedback was not very enthusiastic, despite some useful and contribute ideas. It is a question that how much attention the public pays to the government and its policty. Surely it is somehow too idealistic to say the government and the public should work together, in the case of Hong Kong; but still I think the people should do some more instead of just waiting for the government making mistakes and thereafter blaming it. As a citizen we have our rights and responsibilities.
It is also interesting to see the government attempted to construct pseudo heritage through imitation in the original or a new site. For instance, long ago the Murray Building was removed from Central to Stanley. The one in Stanley is actually a new building and is not quite related to heritage. I don't quite understand the point of doing it, as it is not attractive enough to be a tourist point. At least it is nothing much so special.
The government also promised to keep the original social network, while it tried to rehabilitate people into different places and put the original site into a different use. In Lee Tung Street in Wan Chai, Urban Renewal Authority purchased nearly all properties and decided to develop it into "residential care home for the elderly, day care centre, refuse collection point and public toilet" (Lee Tung Street/McGregor Street Project). It was originally famous of printing services of invitation cards. In the future it will be a residental care home. Asking someone from the Planning Department yesterday, the government will try to build up something similar to the previous livelihood. Then I don't understand how residential care home can relate to the original printing services' street. The original residents there were accomodated to somewhere and the original social community was already destroyed. I don't see how the government realized their promise. When the government said the buildings' structure is too dangerous to be preserved, as I was told yesterday, it is actually fine to build something new for development. Yet I don't quite understand why the government had to promise something they were not planning to do or they could not do. If the government really tries to preserve the original culture there, I don't know if it means the printing services will be established on the ground floor and the care home will be upstairs. This does not sound quite right to my logical sense.
The government published the list of the graded buildings, which was previously inside the "drawer" staying confidential. Yet the grading is just a guideline for various departments without any power to conserve the heritage. It remains unknown what the government is going to do next, or perhaps it has to await public opinion. I wonder some heritage owned by private parties will be redeveloped or demolished before any decision is made.
It is reasonable to see the people related to the heritage want to preserve them, and they are not satisfied when the government does not disclose the reasons of redevelopment. It is interesting when I was told by the government that they are always open to public while some peoplel blame they are not. Then I'd conclude myself that it is the lack of communication in between. Communication takes so much time and will leave Hong Kong lag behind an assumed progress of conservation. As the dominant role in the society, I think it is the government's responsibility to speed up the discussion process and reach a decision as soon as possible.
