The design secrets of Hong Kong’s private housing estates

These residential complexes may look identical, but new book Cities of Repetition unveils their distinct architectural identities – from Mei Foo Sun Chuen to Sha Tin’s City One

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A section of Whampoa Garden apartment complex as seen from above in Hong Kong. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 12:15am, 17 Nov 2024

Keith Chan Shing-hin knows housing estates. The 42-year-old interior designer has spent almost his entire life in City One, a 52-block estate in Sha Tin that is home to nearly 25,000 people. But he has also worked on dozens of renovations in other estates, trying to turn identikit flats in identikit towers into something welcoming and distinct.

His assessment? “I would say they’re quite boring,” declares Chan, the founder of interior design house Hintegro. “There are many limitations when I design an interior for big estates. You don’t have any freedom or flexibility to remove anything.”

That’s not an unusual opinion of the enormous high-rise housing estates that have come to define Hong Kong’s urban landscape. They have become as much a shorthand for the city as neon once was, thanks in part to artists such as Michael Wolf, whose book Architecture of Density (2012) – which featured dispassionate views of estate towers that seemed to have no beginning or end – was an international success. And while their visual monotony is sometimes derided as soulless, roughly a million people live in Hong Kong’s 100 largest private housing estates. When you dig deep, these developments may be more interesting than they appear.

Jason Carlow and Christian Lange, co-authors of Cities of Repetition, in Hong Kong. Photo: courtesy of Jason Carlow

Scholars Jason Carlow and Christian Lange came to this discovery while working on their recently published book, Cities of Repetition: Hong Kong’s Private Housing Estates. Carlow and Lange met when they were both teaching in the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Architecture: Lange is still there but Carlow has since moved to the American University of Sharjah, near Dubai.

“We were both interested in software technologies that allow students and professors to very easily adjust building form and shape,” says Carlow. This means buildings can be designed and built as if on an assembly line, with standardised shapes and components. Diving into the idea of standardisation led them to Hong Kong’s ubiquitous housing estates. “I was fascinated on one hand, but on the other, shocked by the sheer repetition of buildings in Hong Kong,” says Lange. “It’s just amazing.”

A photographic survey of Hong Kong’s private housing estates in Cities of Repetition. Photo: Cities of Repetition

They also discovered that, while there has been plenty of research into the history and form of Hong Kong’s public housing estates – home to more than half the population – there has been relatively little exploration of the private estates built by large property developers. “They had not really been researched or documented,” says Lange.