Making Our City More Walkable for All

Hong Kong is one of the busiest and most compact vertical cities in the world. Yet it is also one of the most walkable urban centres on the planet with networks of interlinked multi-level walkways connecting transportation hubs, markets, shopping malls and residential areas.

However, as the ageing population grows and new infrastructure projects and high-rises are squeezed into the city’s already crowded spaces, people who use these walkways are under increasing pressure to find clear, direct routes to their destinations.

Hong Kong’s ‘walkability’ is now the focus of a number of collaborative projects between academics and NGOs with a view to informing government policies for relieving congested pavements so that pedestrians, particularly wheelchair users and delivery workers, etc., can find the best paths to take.

The HKUrbanLab, the research and knowledge exchange arm of the Faculty of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong, has brought together researchers from medicine, architecture, science and engineering to decode the science of healthy high-density cities.

As part of a study called ‘Walkable Hong Kong’, Associate Professor Alain Chiaradia, from the Department of Urban Planning and Design, is creating a 3D map of Central, to show all of its walkways, ‘skyways’ and underground routes. He is also working with Civic Exchange and the Hong Kong Council of Social Service on a project called ‘Walking with Wheels’, aimed at finding the best barrier-free routes for people in wheelchairs and those with prams and trolleys.

‘One of the objectives of Walking with Wheels is to create a map of all the pedestrian, all the walkable networks of Hong Kong, and we started with Central because it’s the most complicated one,’ he said. ‘Once we are done with this one we are probably ready for anything that comes to us.’

Paul Zimmerman, from Civic Exchange, believes that if Hong Kong can resolve its pedestrian mobility issues, it can be an example to the rest of the world in how to connect multiple layers of walkways in a complex hyper dense environment.

The immediate aim of these projects is to create an open data platform to enable app developers to create detailed apps of Hong Kong that can be downloaded and used to navigate the city, to find the quickest routes between locations.

Led by the Dean of Architecture Professor Chris Webster, the HKUrbanLab will produce scientifically credible data that help public health officials and urban planners design healthy cities for the future.