Another meeting

The LCSD invited me up to Shatin the other day to talk about progress since the workshop with Park Managers. This is their current plan:

There will be an LCSD workgroup led by two ADs (Assistant Directors) to re-vamp signage and furniture in Hong Kong parks and the design of facilities including, most importantly, fencing. They say that they have accepted the principal that accessible, multi-function lawn space should be a priority, which was one of the key issues to come of of the public feedback at the Shatin Freedom Ball. So thanks to everybody who gave and helped collect feedback as, to the LCSD's credit, they do seem to be responding, at least in principal, to feedback from the public. We will of course let you know when and if real changes start to appear (more on that later).

It was suggested that soft fencing will be used instead of the existing hard fences which was a concern for me as merely replacing hard fencing with more aesthetically pleasing soft fencing that still restricts the public from accessing the space doesn't really achieve any meaningful change. However, the LCSD assured me that they were committed to opening up space for public use and that fences would be removed altogether where possible and soft fencing used only where fencing was absolutely necessary. The devil is in the detail of course, so one of the key areas for debate is when fencing is necessary. Of course there will always be a need for some fencing for safety reasons but we're looking to see a fundamental shift in the balance between open and fenced areas.

The first trial of this programme will be in Quarry Bay Park towards the end of this year/beginning of next year (this was incidentally where the one of the first Freedom Ball events was held). The LCSD then plan to roll it out to another venue in the medium term and, based on feedback from this and the Quarry Bay project confirm a set of revised design principles by the beginning of 2012 which will be applied to both new and existing parks.

All in all an encouraging response from LCSD but we still need to see how it pans out in reality and we're still looking for feedback from the public, either here at Freedom Ball or send your thoughts directly to the LCSD if you prefer. So if you have any opinions about park design let us know, now is the time when your voice is most likely to be heard and incorporated into the changes that the LCSD are promising.

Simultaneously we also want to put some pressure on particular test cases to test out the stated philosophy and see whether it can/will be applied in the real world, and if not, why not. We discussed one of these examples at the meeting and I will talk about the details in my next post.