Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai address human side of urban life

Singapore, which has engineered its own version of the near-perfect city, is striving to overcome its one acknowledged failing, a shortage of creative talent. Hong Kong, as long on capitalist energy as it is short on environmental awareness, vows to turn the corner. And neither of those two cities matches Shanghai in the scope of its city-building ambition. A once-flourishing metropolis that suffered from long stagnation under pre-reform communist rule, it's trying to make up for the lost decades in a hurry -- restoring Art Deco mansions, mopping up the messy environment and restructuring its economy all at the same time.

Gordon Siu, Hong Kong's secretary for environment, lands and works, could have been speaking for any of the three cities when he said: "We may be OK compared with other Asian cities, but we clearly have a lot of catching up to do when compared with the leading cities of the world."

London and New York are the giants in the West, not merely as financial capitals but as centers of culture, learning and innovation. In East Asia, the picture is murkier. Tokyo, with its business clout and vibrant arts scene, is seen as one of the world's most important cities. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore are considered the leading Asian contenders for future inclusion in these ranks.

What will make these cities great? In the abstract, it'll take world- class art, concerts and drama, architectural heritage, a diverse population and an atmosphere that fosters creativity -- all, ideally, in a setting that's clean, green and aesthetically pleasing. It's a vague goal and a huge undertaking -- and progress is hard to quantify. But greatness determines a city's ability to draw talented people and long-term investment. So, the stakes are high. The future belongs to people-friendly cities, not those that pour the most concrete, says PricewaterhouseCoopers consultant Sean Duggan, author of two competitiveness studies on behalf of London and Sydney. Hong Kong has also hired his firm to conduct a similar study. "You always look at the outcomes for people: Can a city provide jobs, income and opportunities? Is it a safe, stimulating and pleasant environment? If it can't do all these things well, then it probably won't survive in the long run."

Shiny Bins

ONE prime people pleaser is a clean city. Singapore, which is tough on littering and pollution, tackled this problem long ago. Now Shanghai, and to a lesser degree, Hong Kong, are jumping aboard. Shanghai, which is encircled by polluting textiles and metals industries, has an ambitious cleanup program. It has begun to replace diesel city buses with clean-fuel vehicles. It plans to recycle non-industrial waste on a large scale, something Hong Kong and Singapore have yet to do. Even as processing facilities are being built, Shanghai has placed shiny recycling bins at prime street locations. Soda bottles and cans deposited in the bins are collected every day -- then mixed back into ordinary refuse for dumping.

"We want to get everyone into the recycling habit early so we could get off to a good start once the operation gets going," says Gao Yongshan, head of planning at Shanghai's Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

In Hong Kong, amid a growing outcry over car pollution, the government says it plans to give pedestrians breathing room by banning vehicular traffic in certain areas of the popular shopping districts of Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui. The plans are far from certain. But if they are realized, it would be a departure from the government's fixation on keeping the traffic moving, a preoccupation that makes the territory one of the most pedestrian-hostile cities in Asia.

The plan comes none too soon. Statistics suggest that the city's air quality has fallen well below that of its rivals. Hong Kong's Observatory readings taken at 5 pm show that over 1998, visibility in Hong Kong dropped below 10 kilometers an average of 8.5 days per month. The averages for Shanghai and Singapore were about equal, at approximately four days. What good is scenic Victoria Harbor if you can't see it? a Hong Kong environment official recently asked. In March, a month after Mr Siu took over as Hong Kong secretary for planning, environment and lands, he announced that the government would scale back a planned 38-hectare reclamation of Victoria Harbor by 40 percent. Although opponents of reclamation are far from satisfied, the scaling back represents a rare respite from Hong Kong's insatiable demand for prime building land.

The environmental awareness preached by its chief executive, Tung Chee Hwa, remains mostly in the talking stages. But even that's noteworthy, given Hong Kong's legendary laissez-faire approach to all matters.

"If foreign investors see that our environment is pleasant, they will want to come," Mr Tung said before rolling up his sleeves one recent day to sweep the streets.

Foreign investors are not the only outsiders who come to cities like New York and London. They are joined by an eclectic mix of trail- blazing movers and shakers, thinkers and artists who make their impact felt far beyond their nation's borders. Immigration statistics from Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai offer some indicators of how open they are to the ferment that outsiders can bring.

From 1996 to 1998, the number of foreigners living in Singapore rose 25.3 percent to 702,100, versus a 10.8 percent rise in Hong Kong to 485,800. (Hong Kong has a population of 6.8 million, and Singapore 3.9 million.)

Public Hostility

IN Hong Kong, pleas for foreign investment have been interspersed with official outbursts blaming financial turmoil on foreign speculators. In addition, public hostility to new immigrants from mainland China is strong. By contrast, Singapore's leaders speak out often to reassure their nation that the influx ultimately creates jobs rather than takes them away. "Singapore must become a cosmopolitan, global city, an open society where people from many lands can feel at home," Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said in a speech in 1997, noting that more than half the musicians in the Singapore Symphony were foreign born.

All this suggests that Hong Kong has "a shallower understanding" than Singapore as to what a world city is about, says Hong Kong legislator Christine Loh.

Perhaps more than Hong Kong and Singapore, Shanghai, which sparkled in the 1930s as a "Paris of the East," is angling for greatness. Vice Mayor Chen Liangyu says the city aims to be a showcase metropolis by 2010. "We've gone around the world studying many cities and tried to absorb the best of everyone else's experience," says Mr Chen. "A lot of the street planning is Parisian. The technology is American. There are elements of Tokyo and London."

Tied Hands

AS a city within China's hybrid socialist-market economy, Shanghai faces limits. It couldn't become a world-class business capital, as it envisions, without wholesale financial and legal reform. And, encumbered by rigidities of the authoritarian state, its hands are tied on things like open borders, another hallmark of world cities. (In 1997, the city had an unofficially estimated foreign community of 40,000 living among a 17.2 million overall population.) But in city-building, an undertaking that has been compared to the sweeping 1850s remake of Paris, it has made considerable headway since work began in 1992.

The rebuilding has meandered around many old landmarks in an effort to preserve Shanghai's past. Not everyone is satisfied that enough has been saved, but the effort has yielded visible results. In the historic financial heart, the Bund, an old observatory tower blocking a planned expressway was dug loose and pushed 15 meters down the street. "We had meant to take it apart and reassemble it elsewhere, but that would have preserved the structure and not the context," senior city planner Chen Youxing says of the 60-year-old tower, which held up the road-building for weeks.

Even greater effort is going into renewal of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank Building, the Bund's centerpiece. The 76-year-old neoclassical monument, an unabashed celebration of Britain's imperialist triumphs, is being restored at an approximate cost of $30 million to the city. The building is occupied by the city-run Pudong Development Bank.

In Hong Kong, history often makes way for progress. Edinburgh Square, a small haborfront space where governors were sworn in throughout the colonial period, will find new purpose next year as a traffic diversion. In fact, unlike Malaysia, Singapore and other former British colonies, Hong Kong has very few architectural traces of that era. In the early 1980s, a charming collection of colonial-style buildings was demolished in the central business district, despite vocal campaign by preservationists.

In Singapore, meanwhile, a long-time cultural crossroads with a Chinese majority and large Indian and Malay minorities, the past is a topic of lively debate after decades of bulldozer-driven development. A current focus is the conversion of Chinatown shophouses into boutiques, cafes and performance venues for Chinese opera and poetry recital. Purists fret that history is being turned into a theme park. "What we're getting is a piece of kitsch, a piece of Fu Manchu China," which amounts to "the East exoticizing itself," says Singapore architect Tay Kheng Soon.

Differences aside, these three cities fall equally short of world-city standards on one particular dimension. From Shanghai to Hong Kong to Singapore, material progress over the years hasn't led to trend-setting culture and scholarship.

None of the cities has a newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet whose influence reaches beyond its borders. Thus all are consumers of products branded by Western media conglomerates. And it goes further.

The top cities of India, also a former British colony but materially poorer, are thriving sources of literature. But the three East Asian cities have little comparable besides a few film-industry names. There are no cutting-edge universities and hardly enough home- grown talent for the dance and music stages. "We have a world- class facility, but not so many performances have been world- class," Mr Chen, Shanghai's vice mayor, says of his city's newly completed $120 million Grand Theater.

'Not There Yet'

AMID the financial crisis, Singapore's leaders have called for greater creativity and innovation to spark an economic renaissance. Previously censored performance groups have gained government acceptance, or at least avoided interference. As with many facets of Singapore's civic life, the government sets the parameters: Street musicians can perform now, but they have to donate their take to charity.

Similarly, Shanghai's Mr Chen says modernizing the city's economy requires a "brain change."

The lack of creative sparkle is often attributed to limits on free expression. Shanghai hosts an annual film festival rich in foreign content, but festival-goers have never seen the movies of Zhang Yuan, a Chinese director who has won festival prizes around the world. He can't show his work at home because he refuses to submit to censorship.

But censorship doesn't explain it all. Hong Kong has had hardly any curbs on its artistic freedoms under British and -- so far -- Chinese rule. But as property tycoon Ronnie Chan observes, the city "just isn't there yet" when it comes to intellectual curiosity. Its public libraries keep daylight hours. Its book fairs are heavy on comics for teenagers. And the city's perennial best-selling book, according to bookstore chain Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) Co, is the Hong Kong Street Guide.

Chan Sze-Wei contributed to this article.