The pilot for UrbanPlan introduced to Hong Kong students was quite a different picture compared to the UrbanPlan Hong Kong of today after 18 months of customisation.

Back in March 2018 with our first experience of ULI’s signature education initiative delivered to the ISF Academy’s Grade 10 students, fixed blocks of low-rise terrace housing and predominantly single or dual-use building models comprised the typical building blocks with which to design and propose the ideal neighbourhood.

Students grappled well with the concepts of community uses, spatial planning, social & economic trade-offs, addressing existing context as well as meeting financial goals, however the physical scale and complexity of the built environment that Hong Kong youngsters have grown up in were not easily identifiable.

There was no doubt the students were fully engaged and enjoyed the entire process – as a team designing their scheme to fulfill the brief, collaborating to achieve their own individual goals, as well as the team’s overall objectives – in order to “win” the prize with the best, most responsive scheme.

However much could be garnered from their feedback, both during the workshop experience and formally afterwards, which became the basis for our customization process.  It was completely natural for the students to want to stack the low rise models on top of each other and place the buildings closer together since minimal allowances were required for vehicular planning within the sites at ground level and none at all for parking.

Counter-clockwise from top left: Original US model, customised UK model and customised HK model – evolution of scale & form to reflect the different urban environments.

From that springboard and armed with our appreciation for Hong Kong’s unique physical setting – mountains & harbourfront, cultural & historical references, built examples from the past century to present day & the most obvious, high density, mixed-use – we began our own Hong Kong story.  We identified the handful of basic uses to translate into our building models in real terms, footprints & heights to scale, created scenes that reflect what we see walking along a typical Hong Kong street.  All the good, bad and the ugly we hoped the students would be able to relate to.

We wanted to allow absolute flexibility to mix uses and stack modules in infinitely variable combinations thereby creating varying heights, forms and scale to represent the 3-dimensional urban fabric that reflects Hong Kong.  The architectural design of the individual buildings is not the objective of the program, hence the blocks are modular and analogous, rather the focus is on understanding the drivers for how & why a district is planned and programmed in a certain way.

Students learn that the exercise is not about proposing a right or wrong solution, rather one that satisfies the fundamental requirements of the brief in the most creative, collaborative and sensitive way.  We hope students and adults who take part in UrbanPlan can translate the experience into better collaboration, more awareness of the importance of their built environment and mutual appreciation of seemingly opposing views.

To learn about the regional variations to the UrbanPlan program in Asia Pacific as well as globally, more can be found here.