In October 2010, six hundred community activists, policymakers, academics, researchers, and participants from outside the United States gathered for a two-day conference in the Los Angeles port community of Wilmington. The theme of the conference was the global trade and goods movement system and its impacts. A few weeks before the Los Angeles gathering, a group of researchers, policy analysts, academics, and shippers had come together in Hong Kong to talk about some of the same issues facing the residents of Hong Kong and port cities in China such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. A speaker at the Los Angeles meeting, Veronica Booth, who was part of the local think tank that had pulled together the Hong Kong event, reported on a crucial outcome of a lengthy engagement process with the shipping industry in Hong Kong: a voluntary agreement called the Fair Winds Charter that was about to be endorsed by seventeen shipping companies. The agreement focused on reducing ships’ emissions by substituting low-sulfur marine distillate fuels for the highly polluting bunker fuel source that most shipping lines still used due to its lower costs. Booth told the LA conference of the importance for the Hong Kong groups of Los Angeles’s long history of community action and policy change. This included a Clean Air Action Plan that the Hong Kong think tank and academic participants had referenced in their discussions with the shipping companies. The title of the Los Angeles conference, “Moving Forward Together,” was in this respect an apt name for the emerging linkages among community players, researchers, and policy advocates who were seeking to change conditions in their communities and to insert themselves as players in a global system that often ignored community voices and environmental concerns.
Figure 1.1 Veronica Booth at the Moving Forward Together conference, October 23, 2010. Source: THE Impact Project.
Impacts from the movement of goods through the ports to their final destinations are among the most challenging environmental issues in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and other port cities and regions in the United States and mainland China where the transport of goods over long distances takes place. Two of the groups most directly engaged in “Moving Forward Together” and the Fair Winds Charter initiative were the Los Angeles-based Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI) and the Hong Kong-based think tank Civic Exchange, groups with which the two of us had been connected for several decades.
A year after the “Moving Forward Together” conference, a December 2011 meeting was held at the Civic Exchange office in Hong Kong. The meeting was organized to discuss potential collaboration between Civic Exchange and UEPI, which is housed at Occidental College in Los Angeles. UEPI and Civic Exchange differ in their history and organizational structure: UEPI is based at an institution of higher education but functions as its own independent center for research and action, while Civic Exchange is an independent policy research think tank with informal connections to higher education institutions in Hong Kong. Both, however, shared the goal of engaging in research and action to bring about policy change. The port and goods movement issues were seen as one key area for collaboration since the changes taking place in both Los Angeles and Hong Kong were directly connected. Parallel connections with other urban environmental issues, such as air quality and transportation, were also noted. The meeting concluded with both groups expressing interest in further exploring a collaborative relationship.
The following year, several exchanges took place between UEPI and Civic Exchange. One involved presentations at Occidental College by Simon Ng in November 2012 that Robert Gottlieb had arranged. Simon talked about Civic Exchange’s work related to air quality issues and its research regarding the built environment and public and open space in Hong Kong. After the presentations, Bob and Simon met to discuss additional collaborations. The idea of writing a book was raised as an opportunity to expand the research on the urban environment in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Such a book could compare and contrast Los Angeles’s and Hong Kong’s history and experience with such issues as the ports and goods movement, air quality, water quality, water supply, transportation, land use, public space, open space, and the food system. We asked ourselves: What lessons could be derived from those experiences that could inform the policy debates as well as the role of social movements seeking to influence those debates? We also recognized that such a book would need to identify and analyze how urban environmental issues were being addressed in mainland China and why China’s connection to Hong Kong and Los Angeles needed to be a critical part of such a research project.
As we began work on the manuscript, we were often asked: “Why Los Angeles and Hong Kong?” As one colleague put it, “It doesn’t seem an obvious type of connection.” There was a dearth of literature about global cities that compared Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Some colleagues wondered about the China connection as well; perhaps, some said, we should consider a book primarily about China and the vast changes it had made in the transition to a market economy and from a rural to an urban society and the widely discussed environmental challenges it now experienced. Such questions helped us better target what we needed to address and how we wanted to frame the book.
We have focused on how these two cities (and their larger regions, Southern California and the Pearl River Delta) emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as global cities that have played a critical role in the flow of goods, people, and capital; in their patterns of production and consumption; and in the urban environmental issues that have taken root as a result of the changes they have experienced. China looms large in that context, due to its all-encompassing history and connection to Hong Kong, but also (albeit less visibly) due to the ways it has become intertwined with Los Angeles as well. China is becoming a country of megacities, several of which have also become global cities, such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou, that are integral to our discussion of a Los Angeles–Hong Kong–China connection.
This book, documenting the changing urban environments in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China, is a byproduct of those discussions and our eventual collaboration. It is a book about contrasting development patterns that have begun to converge. And it is a book that identifies how urban environmental issues have risen to the top of the policy agendas of each of these places, where and how change is possible, and how changes are constrained.
Figure 1.2 Simon Ng hosting a meeting with representatives from the shipping industry and the Hong Kong government, July 2013. Source: Civic Exchange.
World Cities/Global Regions
Fifty years ago, the late British geographer Peter Hall was among the first researchers to write about the concept of world cities, defining them as centers of political and economic power. Hall referenced their role as ports in global trade systems and, unlike some later researchers, included the urban environment in his elaboration of the definition of a world city.1 The discussion of world cities was expanded two decades later in the 1980s, at the same time that Los Angeles and Hong Kong and several urban regions in China began to restructure and reposition themselves within a global economy.
The world city hypothesis was further elaborated in a 1986 journal article by University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Urban Planning Professor John Friedmann that built on an earlier paper he had coauthored with Goetz Wolff. Along with other academic researchers who were part of what was called the Los Angeles School, Friedmann identified several components of the world city phenomenon in a period of global economic and social transformation. These included “the form and extent of a city’s integration with the world economy, and the functions assigned to the city in the new spatial division of labor, [which would] be decisive for any structural changes occurring within it.” Friedmann’s world city hypothesis further referenced a core financial role within the global economy; lengthy, multilocation supply chains connected to global systems of production; and an ever-widening income divide among residents, linked to the expansion of immigration across and within borders.2
While the nation-state was locked into an increasingly interdependent global world, it was becoming hard-pressed to contend with the social and environmental consequences related to these changes. This was particularly due to the rise of neoliberal leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who sought to diminish the role of the social welfare functions of the state and to promote the primacy of the market. “There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher famously declared, “only individuals and families” (and its corollary, for her, of free markets). The neoliberals dismissed concerns about the huge income disparities, environmental hazards, and urban demographic shifts associated with the expansion of the world cities and the supremacy of the forces of global capital freed from interventions by the state.3
Who were the world cities? Much of the literature and the subsequent discussions about global cities focused initially on such metropolitan areas as New York, London, Zurich, and Tokyo. They referenced an evolving spatial division of labor between core and periphery based on financial and production (e.g., supply chain) relationships. Los Angeles was designated a world city as much for its role as a center for information and communication and cross-border migrations as for any dominant financial role. Mostly absent from the discussions in the 1980s and early 1990s were some of the megacities in the developing world. Singapore and São Paulo were included as primary centers functioning in “semiperipheral countries,” as distinct from the global cities in the “core countries” (itself a World Bank designation for advanced industrial market economies). Hong Kong tended to be listed as a secondary, semiperipheral city, despite its role in global trade and finance—particularly for the Asia-Pacific region—and its self-characterization as “Asia’s World City.” China’s cities were largely absent from these categorizations since China (along with India) was presumed to be “only weakly integrated with the world market economy.”4
Yet it was during the 1980s that China entered the world market economy and Hong Kong secured its role as one of the “highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy” which included its own shift from manufacturing to finance and specialized service firms.5 China’s major shift toward export-oriented production and the rapid migration of a rural labor force into China’s new megacities, which literally sprang up in just a few years, were changes facilitated in part by Hong Kong. Los Angeles would also play a major role as a destination point for China’s new export products and market economy restructuring. China’s rural-migrant labor force represented a massive source of cheap labor for the new export-oriented industries, many of which were initially located in Guangdong Province and other coastal areas and often financed by Hong Kong capital. As a result, China began to position itself as the “world’s factory” for the production of goods, including those destined for the United States through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. By 2001, when China finally joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) after seeking membership for sixteen years, another global economy axis had begun to take shape, stretching from mainland China through Hong Kong to the Los Angeles region. The combination of major financial and business centers and locations where the production, export, and distribution of goods took place along with the change in migration established distinctive global city connections. At the same time, it was in those locations that the social, economic, and urban environmental impacts on the global cities loomed largest.
Development and Change: Los Angeles
Urban development patterns can serve as a proxy for how the issues of the urban environment take root in cities and regions. Los Angeles and Hong Kong illustrate that point, as do many of the megacities in China.
Los Angeles had long been seen as the quintessential horizontal city, the capital of sprawl. Its ever-expanding developments along its shifting urban edges were facilitated by the interurban rail and imported water systems, and then were further extended by the automobile and its concrete roadways that shaped the patterns of development. Los Angeles, in British architect Reyner Banham’s famous characterization, became known as “autopia,” “a single comprehensible place … a complete way of life.”6
This car-oriented suburban or horizontal pattern of development also helped earn Los Angeles the dual reputation as the twentieth-century model of a new type of urban region in the United States and the country’s most polluted urban environment. Other US cities followed the horizontal expansion model, influenced by car-oriented suburbanization and urban-edge developments. At the same time, Los Angeles’s poor air quality, revealed by its constant haze and smog alerts, became that city’s most recognizable environmental problem.
Water and fire became additional environmental signposts. Los Angeles gained notoriety as a “water imperialist” due to the city’s (and the region’s) search for distant imported water supplies; first from the Owens Valley 230 miles to the northeast of the city, then further away and crossing state lines from the Colorado River, and finally from Northern California. The availability of imported water became the added precondition for Los Angeles’s horizontal and regional expansion, allowing areas without their own local water supply to annex to the city and subsequently to the regional imported water supplier, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.7
The horizontal expansion stretched north and east toward the mountains and the high desert and south beyond the county line to reconfigured agricultural land and shrinking open spaces. Seeking a connection to nature as integral to the new land developments, Southern Californians extended new urban-wildland interface boundaries, creating numerous opportunities for fire, flooding, and debris spills to slide down denuded mountain pathways. John McPhee’s essay “Los Angeles against the Mountains,” describing debris spills in the San Gabriel Mountains and their foothill communities, complemented author Mike Davis’s scathing diatribe to “let Malibu burn” from major fires that continually erupted due to that wealthy coastal community’s own inappropriate developments cutting into adjacent forest.8 In a region prone to fire and flooding, horizontal expansion had created an environmentally combustible and hazardous mix of development that worked against rather than with the region’s ecology of water and fire. Perhaps most notable in this mix was the fate of the fifty-one-mile Los Angeles River, which was transformed during the 1940s and 1950s from a semidry, meandering waterway, with ever-shifting pathways and occasionally torrential flows of water, into a straightened, off-limits, barbed-wired concrete channel with high walls and assorted trash.
Even as new subdivisions in their quest for pastoral settings sprang up at the urban edge along this shifting urban-wildland interface, Los Angeles found itself among the most park-poor cities in the country, especially in the low-income neighborhoods of South, Central, and East Los Angeles. Its land dedicated to the car and to parking constituted nearly a third of the land area in the city and the county, even causing some policy bodies to declare that streets dedicated primarily if not exclusively to cars could be considered “open space.” And Los Angeles, once the largest agricultural producer in the United States, not only saw much of its farm land taken over by new developments at its edge (and within its core), but it also began to encounter enormous problems of food insecurity, including in many of those same neighborhoods without parks and open space (but filled with freeways and truck traffic). This growing problem of food insecurity was related to lack of access to fresh and healthy foods, exacerbated by supermarkets’ abandonment of urban-core communities to move to suburban sites, with their ever greater floor space and large parking lots. Like the residential developments, supermarkets followed the horizontal pathways set by the cars and the freeways.
The horizontal pattern of development, fraught with environmental outcomes, was led by Los Angeles’s leading industry group and boosters, its land developers. Los Angeles also had a manufacturing base that had developed in the 1920s and expanded during World War II that included aerospace, rubber, automobile, and textiles. The discovery of oil in the 1920s further represented a major factor in the city’s and region’s development. Many of these industrial land uses left a toxic legacy in Los Angeles. Petroleum extraction, refining, power generation, and much of the manufacturing and distribution infrastructure contributed to groundwater pollution, land contamination, and hazardous pollutants emitted into the ambient environment.
The development of the entertainment industry, so associated with Los Angeles, was clearly a major economic (and cultural) force in helping shape the region. But it was the land development interests—including real estate developers, the banks and other financial players, the top law firms, and, especially in the earlier half of the twentieth century, newspaper publishers and key policy officials who traded in real estate—that primarily constituted the major decision makers in the region, influencing where and how development would take place.
Many of these land development interests were preoccupied with regional policies rather than global economic considerations. A cross section of those regional players was represented by leading behind-the-scenes power brokers, such as the Committee of 25 group, which consisted of financial, law, insurance, and newspaper executives and was prominent from the 1950s into the late 1960s. During that period, Los Angeles’s global profile was primarily associated with the entertainment industry. Hollywood films and television productions had long sought a global profile and by the 1950s had come to dominate international markets while exporting American cultural images, often of suburban, middle-class lifestyles. Other Los Angeles-based industries which had an international profile, such as aerospace, were already beginning to contract by the 1970s, a process that included the departure of the headquarters and operations of key companies and the shuttering of plants within the region. Los Angeles retained some manufacturing but experienced substantial deindustrialization. Cities like Los Angeles that experienced both deindustrialization and sprawl often found themselves “at the mercy of finance capital, real estate developers, speculators, and office builders,” argues David Harvey.9
Yet as early as the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles began to take on more of a global profile as new immigration from Mexico, Central America, and a number of Asian countries including China led to rapid demographic changes. Los Angeles came to be recognized as a truly global city because of its population, as well as the rise of immigrant neighborhoods, international cuisine, and, as urban planner James Rojas has argued, the reurbanization of areas in the city where immigrants had grouped and settled.10 Even some of the areas once considered “suburbs” took on more of an urban identity due to this demographic shift. Though Los Angeles continued to expand horizontally, it also became denser as a region.
As these demographic shifts continued to occur into the 1980s and 1990s, the region began to position itself, through its rapidly modernizing twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, to become a point of destination for an expanding global economy. Policymakers and public officials led by long-time mayor Tom Bradley (1973–1993) promoted global trade and goods movement as essential economic drivers for the region. Major infrastructure programs were pursued at the port, as well as connected projects such as the Alameda Corridor, which facilitated rail transport from the port to complement the hundreds and thousands of trucks departing from the ports.
This new global profile for Los Angeles created by the huge migrations and a logistics-centered economy came with economic and environmental impacts. Economically, a labor pool of undocumented migrants exacerbated the income divide and related forms of exploitation, while air pollution and other environmental impacts were caused by the ships, the ports, the fumigation facilities, and the trucks, railroads, and warehouses.
The election of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005, made possible in part by more than a decade of community and environmental activism, promised a new era of environmental change. Villaraigosa spoke of Los Angeles becoming the “greenest and cleanest big city in America” and wished to facilitate a shift toward “elegant density” and away from the horizontal development model.11 Various community and environmental networks and organizations developed their own agendas for change, some but not all of which was embraced by the mayor and other policymakers. Initiatives involving parks, trees, and open space, a plan to increase alternative energy sources, a Clean Air Action Plan at the port and a shift to cleaner-burning fuel for trucks, and the development of a Food Policy Council were among the changes proposed and implemented. But the changes in this period were uneven and sometimes counter to an avowed “greening” agenda, and Villaraigosa left office somewhat of a disappointment to his one-time community and environmental supporters.
Eric Garcetti, who followed Villaraigosa as Los Angeles’s mayor in 2013, also pledged to continue and expand an environmental agenda for the city, with a focus on such goals as “complete streets” (more bikeable and walkable places), greater attention to public space, and alternative food opportunities. But many of the problems endemic to the city and the region, such as the enormous income disparities that were also reflected in widespread urban environmental disparities and a growing homeless population, came to be recognized as requiring a more radical reenvisioning and restructuring agenda in order to make Los Angeles, as Villaraigosa had liked to proclaim, the “greenest city in the world.” Today, Los Angeles remains the region with the most pollution, the longest car commutes and most congested traffic, among the greatest income disparities, and a reputation as the most environmentally challenged city in the United States. To create a more livable and just Los Angeles continues to require more of a transformation in policymaking, a major change in the public discourse, and grassroots organizing to develop constituencies prepared to challenge the still dominant forces that shape the region. These are changes that would be at once local and global, and they would position Los Angeles’s own social movements as place-based and part of an emerging alternative global politics.
Development and Change: Hong Kong
If Los Angeles became the oft-cited horizontal city even as it sought to become denser and greener, Hong Kong emerged as the quintessential dense, vertical city, while continually remaking and extending its complex and varied relationship with mainland China, especially the industrial and urbanizing centers in Guangdong Province.
Hong Kong’s early history is bound up with its role as a British colony and its connecting role with China for the trafficking of goods, people, and money. This history dated back to its establishment as a British colony in 1842 and continued through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the colony grew and its role expanded. Originally a fishing village with no natural resources but a sheltered deep-water harbor, Hong Kong traditionally served as an entrepôt with China. There was also a vibrant local manufacturing industry, supported by a quarter of Hong Kong’s workforce in 1931, but its contribution to the economy was often downplayed by the colonial government.12 The situation changed drastically in 1951 when the United Nations imposed a trade embargo on China as a result of China’s entry into the Korean War, and Hong Kong’s position as an entrepôt took an immediate blow. In response to the changing circumstances, Hong Kong laid out plans to expand and further develop its industrial base. Economic transformation was in full swing, supported by the influx of immigrants from Guangzhou and Shanghai, bringing with them capital, entrepreneurship, and labor supply. During this period of industrial takeoff, Hong Kong became the world’s major producer and exporter of textiles and garments, toys, watches, wigs, and high-fashion apparel. During the 1960s and 1970s, export trade continued to grow remarkably, while the volume and value of reexport trade diminished further. Hong Kong was competing with the likes of Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—collectively called “Asia’s four little dragons”—as the newly industrialized phenomena in East Asia. Analyst Y. C. Jao echoed that “Hong Kong’s postwar transformation from an entrepôt into an industrial economy based largely on the export of labor-intensive manufactured goods ranks as one of the most spectacular success stories in recent history.”13
As Hong Kong’s transformation into a manufacturing center gathered pace, urban development also expanded amid an exploding population, rising demand for housing and transport, and the underlying thirst for land. By the onset of World War II, Hong Kong had a population of about one million. After the war, population shrank to 600,000, but within five years it grew to two million. By the end of 1959, the number passed the three-million mark.
A major fire in the temporary squatter area in Shek Kip Mei in 1953 which left tens of thousands of people homeless, coupled with the pressing need for housing from a booming population, pushed the colonial government to roll out a public housing policy with the objective of providing affordable housing for its low-income residents, including the new migrants from China. New public rental housing estates made up of multistory blocks were built on the outskirts of the old urban areas, and later in designated areas further away. The satellite town model, which was later turned into a much more comprehensive program to develop new towns, was a housing-led initiative that diverted forces of urban growth into pockets of undeveloped land outside the urban core—mainly the northern shore of Hong Kong Island, and Kowloon Peninsula south of Boundary Street. Up to the end of the 1970s, over two million people, or roughly 40 percent of the population, were beneficiaries of the government’s public housing program.14
The transport sector also experienced tremendous growth and attracted substantial investment during the period of economic takeoff and population boom. A number of consultancy studies on long-term transport need and strategy were commissioned by the government in the 1960s, leading to major plans for road improvement, highway construction, public transport expansion, and the building of an underground railway system in Hong Kong. This was a golden period in the history of Hong Kong’s transport development, when the foundation of an efficient, affordable, and safe transport system was put in place.
While Hong Kong was slowly emerging as a major manufacturing center, China was facing its own period of turbulence that culminated in the Cultural Revolution of the mid and late 1960s, which included a strong antiurban bias. By the late 1970s, after Mao’s death and the full ascendance of Deng Xiaoping in China and the huge economic and geographic shifts toward market-based capitalism and rapid urban expansion that he launched, Hong Kong stood poised to take full advantage of the changes that were going to occur north of its border, drawing upon its ethnic connection and geographical proximity to mainland China.
China’s market turn in 1979 marked a new era in the country’s economic strategy, moving away from that of import substitution and self-reliance to an economy that encouraged foreign trade and foreign investment. Guangdong and Fujian Provinces were granted special autonomy in handling economic activities with the outside world. In 1980, four special economic zones (SEZs) were established—Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou in Guangdong, and Xiamen in Fujian—to spearhead external economic cooperation and technical exchange, and to attract foreign capital for producing export-oriented goods. The selection of the four SEZs was based on a number of factors: Shantou and Xiamen are home for many overseas Chinese, whereas Shenzhen and Zhuhai are neighbors to Hong Kong and Macau. In particular, Shenzhen’s proximity to Hong Kong, with its capital, know-how, and infrastructure (such as port facilities), was a huge advantage and integral to its early development.
With the changes in China, Hong Kong’s economy also changed as it transformed from a major manufacturing center to one that financed and helped facilitate the expansion of manufacturing in Guangdong Province. Increasingly, Hong Kong became more of a service hub for an industrialized Guangdong, providing such services as insurance, transportation, banking, finance, design, and marketing. Hong Kong’s financial role had become central to the burgeoning flow of funds throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The port continued to expand as a transshipment center for the region, despite the diminished role of Hong Kong’s own manufacturing sector, and became the busiest container port in the world from 1987 to 1989, and again from 1992 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2004.
Hong Kong’s population increased by about one million each decade from 1960 to 1980, and reached 6.6 million at the turn of the century and 7.3 million by 2016. To relieve pressure on the developed urban areas, more new towns in the New Territories began to be planned by the 1980s, with the objective of building public housing estates with less density and better amenities, as space was less of a constraint there. Nevertheless, Hong Kong continued to maintain a strong commercial center in the central business districts. Dispersion of population to new towns and other areas outside the urban core led to a swelling of inbound commuter journeys to the business districts during the morning peak period and likewise a large volume of outbound journeys spreading across the evening rush hours. The need to relieve traffic congestion and to maintain efficient movements of people triggered a continuing wave of new transport projects—to expand the highway system, to add new lines to the rail network, and to enhance public transport services.
The success of Hong Kong’s public transport system—featuring mainly rail and buses plus other complementary modes such as minibuses, taxis, ferries, and trams—is to a certain extent sustained by the city’s high-density development, with its concentration of people and activities. A compact and vertical urban morphology, however, is the root cause of some of the major environmental challenges in Hong Kong. Urban main roads with tall buildings lining up on both sides, for example, create urban street canyons with very poor wind circulation and ventilation. Air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emitted from road traffic are then trapped at the roadside in high concentration, putting the health of pedestrians at risk. While Hong Kong has been able to embark on an ambitious plan of rail development and public transport improvement in the last few decades, it still suffers badly from traffic congestion, inhospitable streets for pedestrians, and a general lack of open space for people. Hong Kong also became a huge consumer and importer of energy, further contributing to air pollution and carbon emissions.15 Hong Kong’s air pollution problems today have even surpassed those of Los Angeles, and, like Los Angeles, its water supply problems became magnified due to its dependence on imported water. As early as the 1960s, Hong Kong experienced massive cutbacks and rationing of water, subsequently forcing it to rely on an imported water supply from Guangdong’s Pearl River Basin for as much as 70 to 80 percent of its water.
The Hong Kong government’s first attempt to study the need for environmental control was to commission a consultancy study in 1974. The Environment Branch was established in 1975, and upon completion of the study in 1977, the Environmental Protection Unit was set up within the Environment Branch to formulate environmental protection policy and legislation. During the 1980s, a systematic approach was taken to handle environmental issues, and the Environmental Protection Department was established in 1986, putting almost all pollution control and prevention works under one roof. In 1989, the White Paper on pollution further explained the scale of the environmental challenge, and put forward a ten-year plan to tackle different types of pollution.16
Despite the plan, progress to improve the environment has been slow, and in some aspects stalled, much to the frustration of academics, scientists, environmentalists, some businesses, and the general public. The situation remained very much the same after the 1997 departure of the British, the creation of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and the establishment of the one country, two systems framework (with China overseeing and placing political limits on Hong Kong’s role). Since 1997, the frequent restructuring of the policy bureau responsible for environmental protection within the Hong Kong government disrupted any significant environmental policy development. A key barrier to effective environmental governance continued to reside with the decision makers at the very top. Environmental protection was never given top policy priority in the colonial government and was largely overlooked by the first two chief executives of the HKSAR in favor of economic development. The lack of leadership and interest filtered all the way down to the different levels of the civil service. While the administration of Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (2012–) was criticized for its economic policies and failure to address the growing income divide as well as its resistance to greater democracy in the political sphere, it did achieve some prominence in the area of the environment. This was largely due to the appointment of environmental leaders Wong Kam-sing and Christine Loh as secretary and undersecretary of the Environment Bureau. Through Wong’s and Loh’s roles, the government put more emphasis on environmental issues, notably on reducing air pollution and protecting public health.
Hong Kong’s social movements have also contributed to the greater focus on the environment as well as a range of other social issues, notably democracy and transparency as witnessed by the 2014 Occupy Central events. Researchers and academic participants have played a role in raising greater awareness of the scale of environmental problems, including air pollution, lack of open space, and food safety and food system problems, among others. For Hong Kong, the tension between economic development, real estate forces, and the environment remains prominent, even as the powerful issues of climate change and resource dependence loom over such policy debates.
The Connection to China
While Los Angeles and Hong Kong experienced major changes during the 1980s and 1990s, the urban, industrial, and environmental changes taking place in China during this period were even more extensive. A huge migration from rural to urban and a multifaceted pattern of urban and periurban growth complemented the explosion in industrial development, including the production of manufactured goods for export. Massive infrastructure projects were designed and completed that were breathtaking in their reach and in the disruptions of existing settlements and the environmental consequences that resulted from their implementation. These changes further had a palpable effect on agriculture and food production, resulting in an enormous loss of farmland and the uprooting of traditional agricultural practices and widespread adoption of industrial agriculture methods. Massive water and energy projects helped fuel the changes in production and agriculture, while the use of pesticides skyrocketed to increase productive capacities but also generated enormous health and environmental impacts. In the cities, whose population continued to double and then triple in just a few years, the car became an increasingly popular symbol of wealth status and an extension of the drive toward modernization while, at the same time, China’s cities witnessed an explosion in rail development. And with the focus on export production (and subsequently of beefing up domestic consumption) as central to economic policy, several of China’s ports quickly climbed to the very top rankings in the world as measured by the number of container boxes being loaded and unloaded and with Los Angeles a major destination point for the massive increase in US consumption of those cheap Chinese goods.17
Table 1.1 Top 10 container ports of the world, 2001 and 2015
2001
2015
1
Hong Kong
Shanghai
2
Singapore
Singapore
3
Busan
Shenzhen
4
Kaohsiung
Ningbo-Zhoushan
5
Shanghai
Hong Kong
6
Rotterdam
Busan
7
Los Angeles
Guangzhou
8
Shenzhen
Qingdao
9
Hamburg
Dubai
10
Long Beach
Tianjin
The social and environmental impacts from these changes were immediate and unprecedented in the size and speed in which they occurred. While millions of rural villagers began to achieve greater food security and reduced poverty, gaps between rich and poor simultaneously increased at a far greater rate than even in Los Angeles and Hong Kong where wealth disparities had become such an important issue. The environmental outcomes, increasingly visible both inside and outside China, were both an embarrassment to the State, a call to action, and a major health and economic concern. These changes were particularly pronounced in the Pearl River Delta area which linked Hong Kong to Guangdong Province and its major cities and megacities such as Guangzhou, Foshan, Dongguan, and Shenzhen.
The severity of the environmental issues in China have had a direct impact on people’s health and the conditions of daily life, particularly in such areas as air and water quality, and food safety and food production. Climate change has also become increasingly prominent, as China’s thirst for energy resources, its massive use of coal, and its status as the leading country in the world of carbon emissions (by volume, though not per capita), has indicated how quickly China’s environmental footprint has changed, itself a byproduct of its rush toward marketization and modernization. China has truly become a global player in so many different arenas, as cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and even Shenzhen have achieved their own global city status.
As China has changed, so too has its connection to Hong Kong—and to Los Angeles. Hong Kong, of course, has always been connected to China, from the British seizure in 1842 to the 1997 handover, the establishment and implementation of the Basic Law regarding Hong Kong’s governance, and the 50 year one country, two systems framework, with all its unsettled outcomes. Chinese migration to Hong Kong has a long history from the very origins of its colonial past, though the uptick of Chinese migration in recent years to Hong Kong (and to Los Angeles) has been an even greater influence regarding the class and demographic nature of those cities. For Hong Kong, mainland China events immediately resonate, whether the 1989 Tiananmen events (where one million people demonstrated in Hong Kong—its largest demonstration ever—in support of the Tiananmen demonstrators) or the SARS outbreak in Guangdong in 2003 that also directly affected Hong Kong. Today, migration from mainland China—and its huge tourist population—draws both rich and poor, even as Hong Kong’s wealthiest individuals and companies have developed their own mainland China investment portfolios and political ties. Hong Kong is informally—and directly—connected to the Pearl River Delta, emblematic for example, of the Hong Kong to Guangzhou high speed train now under construction. Yet despite this apparent seamless border and complex, intertwined relationship, Hong Kong and its counterparts in China, such as neighboring Shenzhen, represent distinctive places—and challenges—in confronting their own environmental, social, and community issues.
The China (and Hong Kong) connection to Los Angeles also takes multiple forms.18 It includes the greatly expanded investments by Chinese companies (some state-owned) in Los Angeles real estate and a wide range of businesses. It includes China achieving its world’s factory designation in the 1980s and 1990s that ran through Hong Kong and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It includes Chinese migration to Los Angeles and California that has a nearly 150 year history. Los Angeles has become a leading immigrant city—upward of 35% of its population are immigrants—and its Asian immigrant population is a key part of the city’s demographic change. Its Chinese population numbers more than 500,000 and whole new areas in Southern California, from Monterey Park to San Marino, have become the new destination points for migrants and tourists alike. Monterey Park, in fact, has the largest percentage of Asian residents (66%, most of whom are Chinese) of any city in the United States. The Chinese tourist population has also skyrocketed, from 158,000 visitors in 2009 to 779,000 in 2015, becoming in the process the second biggest source of international visitors (after Mexico) to Los Angeles.19
Today, the relationships between China, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles have undergone both subtle and profound changes. They have contributed to the reconfiguration of global city networks. And they have led to China’s emergence as a leading global economic player and as a primary contributor (along with Hong Kong and Los Angeles) to the environmental impacts that also define the contemporary global city.
Comparisons and Contrasts
Whether in relation to migrations, economic ties, environmental impacts, political interdependencies, the movement of goods, or their global city roles, Los Angeles and Hong Kong and their megacity counterparts in China are connected. The flow of goods and its environmental impacts provide a starting point. The Los Angeles-Hong Kong-China ties around port, global trade, manufacturing shifts, and the movement of goods have deepened the connections, expanding them to a point where a change in output or other economic (or political) variables can influence all three areas. When strikes shut down the ports in Los Angeles (as they did in 2002 and again in 2012) the impacts could be felt by the retailers and goods movement industries in the United States and the suppliers and manufacturers and shippers and port operations in Hong Kong and China. Similarly, when China began to put in place new policies designed to expand its domestic markets for the goods manufactured in China that had been primarily produced for export (including through the ports of Hong Kong or Shenzhen to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach), the LA ports and goods movement industries sought to calibrate what that might mean for their own operations. And when China’s economy finally began to slow down in 2014–2015, that change also impacted Los Angeles and Hong Kong, not just in relation to their ports but also with respect to migration and investment.
At the same time, the emerging community and environmental advocacy around port and goods movement impacts in Southern California and the policy debates and changes that resulted have been followed attentively in Hong Kong and China. The potential for connections between community and environmental social movement actors (at least at the level of what changes are being advocated or implemented) have become more apparent, albeit often in complex and less direct ways. Not yet a form of “globalization from below,” nevertheless the connections around community and environmental advocacy, whether through NGO relationships, shared research and policy innovations, or budding ties among activists, have begun to emerge. Moreover, the differences in the organizational and political roles and influence of social movements, NGOs or other community and environmental actors in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China, are also important and noteworthy, creating limits to the opportunities for connections, even as the interest in such connections grows.
The areas of the urban environment discussed in the book—water, air, food, transportation, and public and open space and the built environment—all provide a mix of comparative and contrasting histories and current impacts. Each of the places have experienced major environmental changes in a relatively short period of time: Los Angeles especially after World War II; Hong Kong through the 1950s to the 1970s, and then again in the 1980s and after the transfer from Britain to China in 1997; and China after the introduction of market economies and an export-oriented industrialization and the policies promoting urban expansion since 1979. Some of the environmental problems now endemic to those places such as air pollution, the restructuring of their urban form, water imbalances and quality problems, the transformation of agriculture and food security and food safety concerns provide important lessons for each other about the environmental impacts and the limits and opportunities as well as the strategies for change.
Yet it is important to not overstate the parallels and comparisons. Each of the places—Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or the global cities in China such as Shanghai and Shenzhen and Guangzhou—are distinctive places, with their own particular histories and changing urban and environmental dynamics. What becomes valuable about identifying those histories and the environmental changes taking place is not to ignore the place-based nature of those histories and changes, but to learn from and appreciate what makes them distinctive as well as connected. It also provides valuable knowledge in a globalized world and the increasingly dominant role of major global cities and regions. These urban places are the primary actors today in influencing and impacting local and global environments. And they are the central locations in identifying the challenges and opportunities and the linkages to bring about environmental change.
Regional Geographies
The regional geographies of these places help situate the issues of the urban environment. The Los Angeles region is at once connected to a regional watershed, a regional airshed, a regional (and global) food system, regional transportation systems, and regional land use patterns. Los Angeles has long experienced boom and bust population cycles, but since its rapid territorial expansion in the 1920s after its first major imported water project came on line, it has witnessed continual population growth. From a population of more than half a million in 1920, the city doubled its population by 1930, continued to grow modestly during the Depression years of the 1930s (thanks in part to immigrations from the depressed regions of the Southwest and Midwestern US), and then saw its population take off after World War II. The city’s population reached nearly two million in 1950, three million in 1980, four million today. The city’s boundaries stretch outward from the Pacific Ocean to the mountains and beyond to the San Fernando Valley, and to the south through a strip of land to the Los Angeles port area at San Pedro. Los Angeles County includes the City of Los Angeles but also 87 other cities and large unincorporated areas. The county population is more than double the population of the city, having reached nearly ten million today. The larger Los Angeles or Southern California metropolitan region, represented for example by the boundaries of its regional water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, extends 5,200 square miles and includes six counties, dozens more cities, and as many as 19 million people.
Geographically, Hong Kong is located immediately south of Guangdong Province, on the eastern side of the Pearl River estuary, with Macau located on the western side, and Guangzhou at the top of the river mouth. This is commonly known as the Pearl River Delta region (PRD), one of the most economically advanced and developed areas in China, and also one of the most populous with over 63 million inhabitants (including Hong Kong’s 7.3 million).20 Unlike Los Angeles, Hong Kong is administratively cut off from its immediate region and hinterland in southern China since the colonial days, and now as the Special Administrative Region of China under the one country, two systems framework. However, Hong Kong is very much part of a regional watershed, a regional airshed, a regional (and global) food system, and increasingly, a regional transportation network.
In China, the uprooting of what had been predominantly a rural society took place after 1978–1979. This is the primary time frame for our discussion of urban environmental change in China, as it increasingly became urban-oriented, with explosive growth and huge migrations to its Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 cities. These informal classifications of urban areas into different Tiers have become a tool used substantially by economic interests and have included such criteria as population, gross domestic product, housing sales, and income levels, among other factors. The Tier 1 cities (and regions) are still considered the economic drivers linked in part to urban expansion and industrial activity, although central government policies have begun to focus on the development and expansion of Tier 2 cities (including certain provincial capitals) and Tier 3 cities where the rural-urban divide, while changing, is not yet as pronounced.
The Tier 1 cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen are located within the PRD region where rapid urban growth has been connected to the major manufacturing and export industry centers that have contributed to vast migrations from rural areas and other less developed regions. The fast growing cities such as Dongguan and Foshan in the PRD, while considered to be Tier 3, have nevertheless emerged as prime destinations for new capital investments (including foreign investment) and industrial activity, due to their more recent spurts in population and economic growth. The Beijing and Shanghai regions constitute the two other major urban regional constellations associated with Tier 1 developments. While the book primarily discusses the PRD and South China with their long standing connections to Hong Kong as well as to Los Angeles, the issues of the urban environment and environmental problems more broadly are experienced throughout mainland China, albeit in some places more than others.
These geographies—of Los Angeles, Hong Kong, the PRD, and mainland China—situate the book as a discussion of regions: regional population and economic development centers; regional watersheds and airsheds; regional food systems; and regional land uses. But the book also describes these places as part of a global nexus—global cities and regions that are interconnected—even as those problems of the urban environment impact daily life at the most local level. Those impacts are magnified by the global flows of capital as well as of people via new global migration routes.
The Structure of the Book
The chapters for the book are organized by issue area—the critical urban environmental problems and strategies for change in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. Each chapter provides a discussion of the particular histories and issues for Los Angeles and Hong Kong and how they resonate and how they differ from each other. It discusses some of those same issues for China and the ways that China is connected to Los Angeles and Hong Kong. This chapter (chapter 1) provides the background discussion for the book. Chapter 2 describes the history and the growth of the ports, the supply chain infrastructures, and the logistics industries that constitute the goods movement system. It identifies the community and environmental impacts they have generated as well as the struggles to green the system. Chapter 3 discusses the history and current challenges that air pollution poses. Both Hong Kong and Los Angeles—and many of the cities of China—have had and continue to experience the most polluted and hazardous ambient environments in the world. How they have responded, whether by community mobilization, policy initiatives, or by the changing dynamics around such areas as transportation, energy, and land use, suggest whether and how much of a change toward cleaning the air can be accomplished. Chapter 4 focuses on water, including water supply and water quality, as well as what has been called the water quality-driving-water supply relationship. All three places have utilized and become dependent on massive transfers of water. For China, especially, water quality is a major concern, but it also continues to affect Los Angeles and Hong Kong, with Hong Kong dependent on water from China. Chapter 5 looks at the food system, from seed to table, whether local or global, industrial and/or organic. It focuses on how food is grown and produced, where it is sold, and where and how it is consumed, as well as the efforts to construct alternatives and elevate the diverse cultures around food that can counter an increasingly globalized, industrialized food system. Chapter 6 addresses the multiple urban transportation issues all three places confront, whether the rise of the automobile as a dominant or emerging transportation mode and the non-auto-based systems such as rail and their impacts. Chapter 7 discusses the questions of public and private space, land use, and the built environment, including the diminishing nature of open space. The final chapter, chapter 8, discusses the social movements and policy initiatives for change and the barriers to change. Where and how social movements and policy initiatives can affect change provide lessons not only for Los Angeles and Hong Kong and China, but more broadly for changes in the urban environment in global cities and the other places around the world that they influence.
The book has been organized to identify and evaluate the complex interplay between core and periphery, global city/region and local places, and to elaborate the shared and distinctive experiences of Los Angeles and Hong Kong and their connections to China and its cities. As awareness of these connections increases, it helps identify the need to think and act globally and locally, and to find out where and how environmental change can take place in these stressed and environmentally challenged places.
