Future Hong Kong vision: Kai Tak tourist hub moves closer to reality

The project to build a tourism hub on the former Kai Tak airport site has moved one step closer to reality with the launching yesterday of a 10-week open invitation for developers to submit expressions of interest. Yet the area could ultimately look vastly different from the winning proposal that the government chose in an urban design competition last year.

The 5.93-hectate “tourism node” at the tip of the former Kai Tak airport runway, located close to the Kai Tai cruise terminal, will provide a total gross floor area of 230,000 square metres to house what the government calls “edutainment” facilities, hotels, shops and offices.

An entry submitted by a team comprising urban design masters students at the University of Hong Kong was picked by a jury chaired by Secretary for Development Paul Chan Mo-po last year as the best among 80 plans. Under the winning proposal, the runway tip would be broken up to form three islands on which parks, a bicycle track, a swimming pool, a tourism centre, a hotel and a festival stage would be built, while smaller, triangular floating islands would dot the water between the Kwun Tong promenade and the runway.

“A design is only a design. We have not done any calculation to assess whether the tourism facilities under the design would generate financial gains enough to cover the cost to provide the recreational facilities,” said office head Brenda Au Kit-ying, who heads the Development Bureau’s Energising Kowloon East Office.

Although the government had specified that the commercial and leisure parts should account for 55 per cent and 40 per cent of the floor area respectively, with the remaining five per cent reserved for other uses such as transport facilities, Au said it would allow the chosen developer flexibility of plus or minus five percentage points. The office is inviting developers to submit design proposals with rough financial estimates, but the expressions of interest will be non-committal. Those who do not join this exercise will still be allowed to bid for the site when it is put up for sale by tender next year.

“This is not a purely land sale exercise. We hope to collect more ideas from the market. Perhaps interested parties will come up with innovative ideas that we can add to the land sale clauses,” she said as she explained why non-binding invitations were being invited.