Hong Kong Station, Half-Way between Centre and Fragment of Airport City

In 1989, the incentive to relocate Hong Kong’s international airport to the outskirts of the metropolis was strengthened by a large scale urban strategy, which was led by the Government. It turned out to be an opportunity for improving the accessibility and the visibility of the metropolitan territory, as well as new opportunities for its urban development. But tasks are different according to the scale we are looking at: in the long term, the purpose concerned the integration of Hong Kong to an emerging megalopolis (the Pearl River Delta’s) where the new airport and its newly developed town would potentially form a regional core; in the short term, the target aimed to reduce the commutation traffic thanks to an increase of the urban density next to each node of the new transport infrastructures. The Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC), a semi-private company, has built up several real estate projects over the main stations of the Airport Line — MTRC fast subway line which directly connects the new airport and Hong Kong CBD since 1998. It has been led by a double strategy: to self-finance the non-helped cost of the infrastructure, and to make profitable scarce and expensive land. This innovative mix of urban planning, transport operation and real estate development is now producing most of the urban forms which regenerate Hong Kong’s post-war urban fabric: high density, mixed-use programs (commercial and office space, housings), monumental scale, etc. If those urban forms are now common in Hong Kong, however, the hybrid typology of Hong Kong Station — the “urban terminal” of the Airport Line — leads us to (re)evaluate the status and the role of transport facilities in an urban context. Built up on an almost 6 hectares of harbor reclaimed land, and designed by international architectural firms, this hybrid building gathers functional and typological elements which are borrowed from the worlds of finance and air travel: an international finance center and its skyscraper — the very first one in Hong Kong —, a shopping centre, a high class hotel but no housings, a transfer hall for subway lines, a large atrium or decentralized airport hall which offers services such as checking in for luggage, etc. The dynamics of scales operated from the outskirts towards the city centre converted planning mechanisms into a veritable development strategy that restructured the heart of the metropolis at the same time as it reinvented its urban form. In another sense, does this “hyper-hub” not indicate the emergence of a new generation of airport cities?