Hong Kong's ‘urban living rooms' – can these public spaces survive?

South China Morning Post

6 hours ago

In the Kowloon City Municipal Services Building, you can play badminton, borrow a book from the library, sample some of Hong Kong's best Thai food and shop in a wet market where actor Chow Yun-fat is sometimes spotted buying his groceries.
But not for much longer. The
landmark complex is set to be demolished and redevel­oped in the near future. For University of Hong Kong associate professor of architecture Ying Zhou, it's an example of both Hong Kong's architectural ingenuity and how crucial parts of the city's built environment are taken for granted.
'They're unique,' she says of the municipal services buildings. 'In other cities, there's more space, but in Hong Kong, they stick all of these different uses together. People don't appreciate them because they're modernist, and they see them as just an ordinary part of their lives.'
Drawings and photographs of Hong Kong's municipal services buildings, at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025. Photo: Oliver Law
Zhou wants Hongkongers to understand why these buildings are special. As a co-curator, alongside Fai Au and Sunnie Lau Sing-yeung, of
Hong Kong's official exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture , which runs until November 23, the scholar decided to highlight the structures, their history and their role as 'urban living rooms'.
Titled 'Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive', the exhibition includes photos, drawings and descriptions of nine outstanding examples of the 43 municipal services buildings in Hong Kong. For many people, they are everyday destinations for food, sport, leisure, education and entertainment, but for Zhou, they represent an era when Hong Kong invested in the public good – a 'bygone era of civicness' in a hyper-commercial city.
'There have been no new constructions of [municipal services buildings] since the 2010s,' Zhou wrote in a 2023 article for the urbanism journal Monu. That underlines 'the precarity of this architectural type in the face of a growing erosion of municipalness and social urbanism'. In a city of countless shopping malls, can these low-cost, community-oriented structures survive?
In a city of countless shopping malls, can these low-cost, community-oriented structures survive?
Municipal services buildings were originally known as Urban Council complexes, after the partially elected body that managed the municipal affairs of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon before 2000; its New Territories counterpart was called the Regional Council.