Funding body: Interdisciplinary Research Fund in Smart Cities (IRF-SC), Hong Kong
Principal Investigator: Prof Geoffrey Qiping Shen, Smart Cities Research Institute, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Co-Investigator: Helen Bao
Budget: HKD 500,000 (Approximately £50,000)
Abstract:
Smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology solutions into a platform to manage a city. As a combination of smart living, smart economy, smart people, smart information, smart governance, smart mobility, and smart environment, smart city requires an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to guarantee its effective implementation. How can we promote Hong Kong to be a smart city with a connected future?
Hong Kong is a city that is suffering from a chronic lack of land resources, housing supply, and the effects of high-density urban development. Land is a scarce and valuable resource in Hong Kong; hence, the most imperative and difficult challenge is related to land use policy. One way to address the issue of land supply in Hong Kong is the intensive and efficient land use strategy. To meet the increasing demand of urban development in the future, the land use potential needs to be tapped as much as possible based on the limited land resources. Specifically, plot ratio/building height (PR/BH), and development density could be appropriately relaxed if the local environment will not be influenced significantly; land use efficiency could be improved by rationalizing the land use distribution, optimizing the mixed land use, and enhancing the infrastructure capacity based on a participatory platform.
This proposal provides an innovative participatory platform based on spatial analysis technologies to support land use policy-making on smart city development in Hong Kong (Kowloon East development as the study area). Local environmental impacts and infrastructure capacity are two major concerns of land use policies for urban land development. This platform can simulate local environmental impacts through 3D spatial analysis technologies based on different scenarios with different restrictions. Moreover, 3D visualization and scenario analysis in this platform could help the non-professional public understand the developing land and its future development, which is beneficial to the public engagement. Stakeholders/decision makers could readily understand and participate in public consultation for better land use policy-making with the assistance of this platform. Therefore, the proposed platform can be used as a policy-making support tool for the government to assess whether the current land use policies are compatible with smart/sustainable city development or not, and to let more stakeholders/the public truly engage in the public consultation process.