Hong Kong is one of those places, alongside Singapore and Manhattan, that often gets cited as
a failure of urbanism — an overdose of density, an example of what you don’t want your city to
look like. Sometimes it’s wacky suburban NIMBYs who worry that their California town is on its way
to becoming the next Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China,
but sometimes it’s legitimate, otherwise respectable urbanists who want to contrast
“good” mid-rise densification with “bad” high-rise densification. We think all of this is a little
unfair to Hong Kong. There’s a reason Hong Kong is like this, and why other cities probably
won’t end up the same way. We should stop using Hong Kong as our density punching bag.
The urban form of Hong Kong — wall-to-wall high-rises — is genuinely very striking. You
actually can find other types of housing there, even some detached homes, but it’s closer to being
a high-rise city than any other city we’ve looked at. Even New York doesn’t really fit into the
same category. People associate New York with the skyscrapers of Manhattan but most of New York (and
even a big part of Manhattan) is actually just low- and mid-rise apartments. New York is also
surrounded by swaths of low-density suburbia that don't have a Hong Kong equivalent. In other words,
Hong Kong’s density is pretty unique. So why exactly is Hong Kong the way that it is?
The answer is that Hong Kong is a small, mountainous city with not a lot of buildable land
that experienced a population boom after World War II. People fled civil war and an authoritarian
government in mainland China in search of political freedom and economic opportunity,
with Hong Kong’s economy booming in manufacturing, finance, and trade. There are other factors too:
the government makes a lot of money from taxing and selling land, and people have accused it of
quietly inflating land prices, which would also encourage higher densities. We’re not going to
defend that. But the fundamental dynamic is that Hong Kong has been a refuge, politically
and economically, and high densities are how you house a lot of people on not a lot of land.
Officially Hong Kong has a density of 7,000 people per square kilometre. That’s about the
same as the City of San Francisco, which is moderately but not extremely dense.
But that includes all the mountains and nature reserves that the city can’t or won’t build on.
One estimate puts the developed parts of Hong Kong at 26,000 people per square kilometre,
more than Paris and almost the same as Manhattan. But even that doesn’t quite
capture the density here because it also includes the outlying towns and villages,
often agricultural or industrial, which are still found throughout the New Territories,
a large part of the city that, for political and historical reasons, has been less developed.
If we focus on Kowloon specifically — the biggest area of consistent development
in the city — we’re looking at densities approaching 50,000 people per square kilometre.
We can even go further than this, though. The Hong Kong census has fine-grained data on major housing
estates where almost two thirds of the population live that can give us a pretty good idea of just
how high (and how low) density goes here. Maybe surprisingly, there are a few low-density,
almost suburban-style neighbourhoods — at least by Hong Kong standards. This area of detached
homes with some duplexes and townhouses has a density of 8,000 people per square kilometre,
still double or triple the density of a typical North American suburban residential district.
But the vast majority of these housing estates have a population density above 100,000
people per square kilometre, which as we covered in our last video on
density is basically the extreme high end in the U.S. and Canada.
In Hong Kong, at least these major housing developments, it’s closer to the low-end.
One example of 100,000 per square kilometre is this complex made up of 30-storey towers
surrounded by open space with a pool. Moving up to 250,000 people per square kilometre,
we’re at the average density for Hong Kong housing estates. This complex has 12 towers surrounding
a courtyard with tennis courts, with a mall and parking garage on the side. How high can we go?
Here’s 400,000 people per square kilometre, from a cluster of 57-storey towers. Here’s 500,000
people per square kilometre. 600,000 people per square kilometre, anyone? And the very
highest density housing in this dataset is this three building development, one
of which reaches 59-storeys high, for an overall density of 700,000 people per square kilometre.
Because they’re so visible from far away, tall buildings occupy a really special place in
people’s perceptions of density, but as we saw in this video, the density of a high-rise development
can vary substantially depending on just how high it goes and how much of the lot it covers.
The very highest densities require very tall buildings that cover most of their lot — at
least in most cases. No chronicle of Hong Kong density would be complete without a mention of
the Kowloon Walled City, a slum demolished in 1993 that had an astonishingly high population density
of two million people per square kilometre. At up to 14 storeys high, the Walled City wasn’t short
by any means, but it was much shorter than you’d expect for that extreme density. This shows how
economics and demographics also affect density — an area with poverty and overcrowding can
have a much higher density than you’d expect just looking at the building configurations.
The main lesson here is that, from a North American or even European perspective,
Hong Kong is on a whole other level of density. Even compared to a relatively
dense place like Toronto or New York, Hong Kong’s high-rises are generally taller, closer together,
and they cover much more of the city. And when you look into why Hong Kong is the way it is,
it becomes clear that almost no other city has to worry about becoming like it,
whether you think that would be good or bad. No regular city in a country that we
can think of has the same combination of high demand and extremely low land availability.
Hong Kong itself might not even have these same conditions into the future, because
its political freedoms and economic advantages over mainland China have been slowly eroding.
Our cities can and will continue to densify with high-rises (and hopefully mid-rises and
low-rises too) but they probably won’t reach the same peak densities and definitely won’t
reach the same overall high-rise hegemony you see in Hong Kong in our lifetimes.
“We need to densify but we don’t want to turn into Hong Kong” is the equivalent of “I need to
go to the gym but I don’t want to turn into Arnold”. And even if cities like New York,
Toronto, or London do still get too tall or dense for your personal preferences,
all of these countries have lots of other smaller, less dense cities and towns you
can choose instead, which isn’t so much the case for a quasi-city-state like Hong Kong.
One limitation of the data we’ve used is that Hong Kong homes are famously small,
which could technically inflate the density numbers if more people are living in a smaller
space. But they’re small when you compare them to countries, like the U.S. or France.
It’s less clear that they’re small compared to other cities, like Paris or New York.
It’s hard to find data but Paris also has famously small apartments. For reasons like this,
density calculations aren’t always perfect, but the pattern is clear: Hong Kong is really,
really dense, especially in the built-up parts of the city.
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