Peoples’ heritage, people’s places : the social value of urban public open spaces in Hong Kong

Abstract

In Hong Kong, the recognition of heritage places is in the form of declared monuments and graded historic buildings. These recognized heritage places tend to be in the form of individual buildings/structures or clusters of buildings, and very seldom spaces, and to date, no open public space in Hong Kong has been recognized as a heritage place. Why is this so? As a design professional familiar with spatial design, the author thinks that it is due to the Hong Kong Government’s focus on historical and architectural values in evaluating built heritage. It is more straightforward to establish the heritage significance of a heritage building in terms of historical and architectural values, but less so in terms of social value, and therefore social value tends to be ignored in most government evaluation of heritage buildings in Hong Kong. In this dissertation, the author proposes an original approach to the evaluation of heritage spaces in Hong Kong, by approaching it with the heritage value that is often neglected in Hong Kong – social value – and to demonstrate that such an approach is indeed feasible for the evaluation of heritage spaces, particularly urban public open spaces. This research is about public open spaces in Hong Kong, and the author wishes to focus on those in the urban setting, and within the scope of social value. In general, there is limited academic research relating to examining Hong Kong’s urban public open space from a heritage perspective, and particularly from the perspective of social value. The literature review shows that vast majority of the published studies on Hong Kong’s urban public open spaces tend to focus on the typology, spatial design, and, to a lesser extent, the collective memory of such spaces. There is no specific scholarly publication that employs the concept of social value to investigate how an urban public open space in Hong Kong is related to a local community, and how the community establishes social value with the space. Thus, this dissertation aims to fill this research gap by discussing the meaning of social value to urban public open spaces in relation to the user-community of such spaces.