Cities as imagined in the brochures of their property developers often have a mildly hallucinogenic quality—but Hong Kong lavishly so. Depending on what kind of homebuyer is targeted, the catalogs show either a sunbathed arcadia of wooded hills, sunsets and pristine water, or a blazing Gotham, its denizens clad in evening dress, devoting themselves to lives of romance and lolling about, champagne flutes in hand. From these implausible environments arises the rococo apartment block touted by the developer. To emphasize it, surrounding buildings that—in reality—would be there are often simply airbrushed away, leaving the potential buyer holding onto a sanitized fantasy of the one kind of building that hardly exists in Hong Kong: the solitary tower.
None of this is a surprise, but what is unexpected are the crafty liberties taken by the Hong Kong Government when it tries to sell its development plans to the Hong Kong public. This story in one local paper compared completed public projects to the artist’s impressions prepared of them when their construction was first announced. It is a shoddy litany of cancelled green zones, shrunken parks, vanished plazas and no-show trees. The Architectural Services Department is the government department tasked with making the drawings, but “the artists’ impressions were only artists’ impressions,” its spokeswoman said. No one was meant to take them too seriously. The prognosis for Hong Kong harborfront development—an era-shifting project that will, according to its artists’ impressions, terraform parts of Hong Kong Island’s north shore into the kind of landscaped greenbelt Hong Kong so desperately needs—seems suddenly poor.