09:30-11:50
KEYNOTE SESSION

Mass Housing, Slum Clearance and New Towns – The Hong Kong and Singapore Experience in a Global Historical Context
Miles Glendinning

‘Towns of Tomorrow’: New Towns in England, Scotland and Wales, 1940s-80s
Alistair Fair

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13:00–14:45
PANEL 1— URBAN EXPERIMENTS AND NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT ACROSS BORDERS

Hendrik Tieben
Shatin New Town and Shekou Industrial Zone - Reflections on Two Urban Experiments vis-a-vis the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Border

Liqin Ju
Shekou Industrial Zone - Negotiating the Urban Memory of a Chinese Experimental Community

Jeroen van Ameijde
Planning Healthy Cities? The Evolving Macro-Structures of Hong Kong's New Towns

Inge Goudsmit
Framing New Towns: Spatial Agency and the Politics of Representation

Daan Roggeveen
Growing Our Cities from Within: A Collaborative Approach to Urban Densification

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15:00–16:30

PANEL 2— URBAN REGENERATION AND HOUSING PRACTICES

Geraldine Dening
Alternatives to Demolition: Estate Regeneration from London to Hong Kong

Yuting Hou
Are Singapore’s New Towns Self-contained? An Examination Based on Post-COVID-19 Public Transport Smartcard Data"

Melody Yiu
“(Re)Balancing Lifestyle”: Town Halls, Civic Centres and Spatial Governance in 1970s Hong Kong

Mandy Lau
Everyday Consumption Practices in Small Public Housing Flats in Hong Kong

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16:45–18:00

STUDENT SHARING OF STUDIO PROJECTS & CONCLUDING ROUNDTABLE

Mass Housing, Slum Clearance and New Towns – The Hong Kong and Singapore Experience in a Global Historical Context

Miles Glendinning
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

This lecture highlights Hong Kong's twin track discourse of parallel urban ‘slum clearance’ and planned new town ‘overspill’ housing as a colonial-origin strategy, first proselytised in early and mid-20th century Britain, which was then appropriated and developed in two radically different ways in late 20th-century Hong Kong and Singapore. Examining both the governance and built-form aspects of these linked programmes of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ renewal, it first highlights the peculiar strength of the concept and practice of radical slum clearance within the Anglophone world, before homing in on the specific ways in which slum clearance and planned new towns developed symbiotically in Hong Kong and Singapore.

‘Towns of Tomorrow’: New Towns in England, Scotland and Wales, 1940s-80s

Alistair Fair
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

This presentation will give an overview of the post-war new towns programme in England, Scotland and Wales, which, as conceived by planners like Patrick Abercrombie (who also worked in Hong Kong) set out to engage with questions relating to the distribution and housing of the population and the location of industry. It takes its title from a film made about one of the most internationally celebrated of these new towns, Cumbernauld in central Scotland. Noting the ways in which the new towns were bound up with wider policy debates and professional networks, the running theme of the lecture will be the extent to which questions of ‘urbanity’ - understood in terms of density and mobility - were of particular concern to planners. In this respect, while on the one hand the new towns show a clear evolution in terms of planning and architectural ideas, they also demonstrate important continuities and an ongoing debate about what a modern town - a ’town of tomorrow’ - could be.

Symposium Convenors

Cecilia L. Chu, School of Architecture, CUHK
Melody Yiu, School of Architecture, CUHK
Jeroen van Ameijde, School of Architecture, CUHK