Opinion | Why Hongkongers aren’t wild about moving to the Greater Bay Area – yet

Name: China's ambitious plan to develop it own ‘Greater Bay Area’
Uploaded: 2022-05-15T02:15:16.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: China's ambitious plan to develop it own ‘Greater Bay Area’

Will there be a future in which young people and skilled professionals aspire to work and live in the Greater Bay Area? Probably, but it must happen organically

Government hard-sell won’t persuade people, but they will be lured by private firms offering unparalleled opportunities that will drive healthy competition

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Hong Kong’s northern area along the Shenzhen border. Friendly rivalry between the two cities and their peers in the Greater Bay Area could be to the benefit of all involved and the country as a whole if it spurs greater innovation and competition for top talent. Photo: Martin Chan

Dennis Lee

Published: 10:15am, 15 May 2022

In 1968, IBM commissioned American architects Charles and Ray Eames to make a film called Powers of Ten. The nine-minute short film took the viewers through a stunning visual journey in which the camera zoomed out from an outdoor picnic by the Chicago lakeside to the universe 100 million light years away, and then zoomed back in, to within 0.000001 angstroms of the picnicker’s hand.

Other than showcasing the processing power of the cutting-edge computer at the time, its creators introduced it as “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe”. Why hire architects to make the film? Because architects know scale.

In design, development and planning, size matters. From a door handle to a flat, a building to a walkable neighbourhood, a metropolis to the country, we relate to our surroundings and navigate with consideration to proximity and mobility by scale.

With nine cities in Guangdong province beyond Hong Kong and Macau, the scale of the Greater Bay Area is enormous. Compared with its peers in New York, San Francisco and Tokyo, the Greater Bay Area wins hands down in terms of size, with around 56,000 sq km of land.

However, being larger might not be an advantage, as we can end up feeling detached from the peripheral regional cities. It almost makes no difference whether we consider them part of the Greater Bay Area or the nation at large. This is similar to when, minutes into Powers of Ten, we have trouble relating to the perceived space when the camera zooms out beyond a certain distance.

02:35

China's ambitious plan to develop it own ‘Greater Bay Area’

For years, air travel has shrunk our sense of scale. We can reach any corner of China within hours when visiting our mainland counterparts, and in the past many people hopped on the first flight out and caught the last flight back for a day trip to Shanghai or Beijing.