Hong Kong Is Scrapping Its Famous Mong Kok Pedestrian Zone. What Should We Be Asking About Street Space?

Shut it down or regulate it — and if regulate, how? It is also a question of how a city uses its public space.

On May 24, a motion to scrap the Mong Kok pedestrian zone passed the Yau Tsim Mong District Council in Hong Kong. The 18-year-old zone — most of us know it as a pedestrian street — is probably the block with the most street performance in Hong Kong, and it is to be abolished and turned back into a roadway. Hong Kongers call the move "killing the street."

The motion was filed by four pro-establishment district councillors from the Business and Professionals Alliance for Hong Kong, and passed 15 to 1, with one abstention. A Transport Department representative at the meeting said the department would analyze traffic flow as soon as it could and then hand the matter to the Home Affairs Department for public consultation; the whole process, up to the formal removal of the zone, was expected to take four months. A second motion at the same meeting, asking the government to open a pedestrian zone somewhere else where street performers could promote local culture, passed with 16 votes.

Pedestrian Zones

In 2000, to relieve crowding and the fight between people and cars in Mong Kok, the Transport Department "permanently" set aside a pedestrian zone with fixed hours on Sai Yeung Choi Street South and three nearby streets: Monday to Saturday, 4 pm to midnight; Sundays and public holidays, noon to midnight. The boundaries were widened in 2003 and 2004, with Sai Yeung Choi Street South always the main stretch. The zone became a gathering place for buskers. It also drew commercial outfits — telecom operators above all — who set up roll-up banners to advertise, plenty of hawkers, and no shortage of Hong Kong civic groups holding public speeches, political campaigns and debates on public affairs.

A recent example: in 2017 the Civic Party, along with several other pan-democratic legislators, set up a booth in the zone to discuss the "co-location" immigration arrangement for the Hong Kong section of the Guangzhou–Shenzhen–Hong Kong Express Rail Link. It was not only the big parties who argued public issues here; student groups and ordinary residents gave speeches too.

Shops on both sides, thick foot traffic, no cars: the zone became a first choice for street performers. Singers, painters, acrobats, photographers — more and more of them, of every kind. The space stayed the same size, so however good the unspoken etiquette, claiming a patch to perform on led to conflict.

A 27-year-old improv performer told the South China Morning Post: "Even once you've managed to claim a spot, there's always a contest over who can be louder, just to draw a crowd." The result is a zone that keeps getting louder. On Wednesday the 23rd, Hong Kong's Cable TV News reported that its reporters had measured more than 90 decibels that evening at both ends and in the middle of Sai Yeung Choi Street South.

In the episode "A Wandering Stage" of RTHK's Hong Kong Connection, residents living along the street said that when the zone was new there were fewer cars and not many performers, and it was much quieter than before — "it really was good." But as more performers came to set up here, complaints from nearby residents and shops grew, mostly about noise and light.

So from the beginning of 2014 the zone's hours were cut back to Saturdays and Sundays only. The noise did not noticeably improve.

Home Affairs Bureau data shows that noise-nuisance complaints to Mong Kok Police Station, which used to run past a thousand a year, fell to 633 in 2014 and 722 in 2015, then climbed back to 1,224 in 2016 and 1,276 in 2017 — almost back to where they had been before the hours were cut. (Sing Pao reported in 2005 that the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department received more than 1,300 complaints in 2004.) The complaints seem to have accomplished little. Home Affairs figures show that from 2010 to 2016 the departments concerned received an average of 886 complaints a year but issued only single digits of summonses. In 2017 the number jumped: Mong Kok Police Station told the South China Morning Post it issued 77 summonses that year, and 23 people were fined between HK$800 and HK$1,500.

None of this means the police did nothing. Under Hong Kong law street performance is legal, and there is no such thing as a license for it. No ordinance is aimed at busking; prosecution is only possible when a performance amounts to something else — nuisance, or obstruction, what Hong Kongers call "blocking the street."

And the ordinances that do apply, such as the Noise Control Ordinance, set no clear numerical threshold for noise nuisance, which makes enforcement hard: any action is difficult to justify to the public, so the police tend to let things go.

Street singing, like anything else, has its professionals and its amateurs, and bad singing is more likely to be heard as a nuisance.

Amateur singing in Mandarin is more contentious still. The "dama stalls" — groups of middle-aged women — appeared only in the past few years. Unlike other buskers, they sing together, or take turns at a single stall, mostly nostalgic golden oldies in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

On June 28, 2015, on Sai Yeung Choi Street South, Hong Kong localists quarrelled with a dama stall they took to be mainlanders, accusing the singers of hogging the zone and making noise. Then pro-Beijing, pro-establishment groups arrived to back the stall, and the subject of the argument changed — it was no longer only about street-performance nuisance. The shouting turned into a scuffle, and ended with the police firing pepper spray.

Short of scrapping the zone, is there another solution?

Could licensing regulate street performance? That is exactly what the other camp argues. They oppose the current one-size-fits-all plan, calling it "cutting off your toes to avoid sandworms" — destroying something useful to be rid of a small nuisance. A Civic Party councillor from the pan-democratic camp put another motion to the meeting, asking the government to consider suspending the zone until it produces a proper regulatory and licensing system. It was voted down, 14 against.

Licensing brings a problem of its own. Set the bar too high and it risks infringing the freedom to engage in literary and artistic creation and other cultural activities that Article 34 of the Basic Law guarantees; set it too low and the license means nothing.

Some performers think regulation can still work. "Mr. Funny," Hong Kong's best-known busker, whose real name is Su Chunjiu, says the government could do more — set rules on how long a performance lasts, for example. He makes a point of stopping after ten or fifteen minutes and letting the crowd break up before he starts again, so as not to block the way, rather than, as he puts it, "singing for three hours straight with a big crowd standing around."

Some big cities have no dedicated ordinance either, but they do have more detailed and clearer rules. Greater London, for instance, limits how long an audience may stop and watch a single act: no more than an hour. In areas with a formal busking scheme — Covent Garden in the center of the city, for one — performing requires a license applied for in advance.

If noise from the performances were the only issue, the fight over keeping or killing the zone would not be this fierce. Before the hours were cut in 2014, Chen Jialuo, then chairman of the Legislative Council's Panel on Home Affairs, wrote that the main source of chaos in the zone was the growing number of commercial promotions and advertising banners. He predicted that once the hours were cut the promoters would simply move their pitches onto the sidewalk, and that restoring traffic would bring back the old problems: people and cars fighting for room, air pollution, and noise from the vehicles.

Public opinion is split, too. A 2013 survey of passersby, commissioned by the Home Affairs Department and carried out by Hong Kong Shue Yan University's Centre for Corporate and Social Development, found 54% satisfied with the state of the zone, 40% in favor of cutting the number of open days, and 62% saying the status quo could stand. The survey's design has been questioned, and no more convincing poll has appeared since.

Hong Kong has had street culture like this before. The most famous was Tai Tat Tei in Sheung Wan — a patch where neighborhood vendors set up stalls, now Hollywood Road Park. From 1841 it grew into a night market, and it lasted until it was turned into a park in 1990. Tai Tat Tei had a flea market, dai pai dong food stalls and impromptu performances, which earned it the name "the commoners' nightclub." Some Hong Kong residents still go regularly to today's Mong Kok pedestrian zone to hear people sing, and one reason is that it reminds them of the old Tai Tat Tei.

The Hong Kong government has tried before to steer buskers elsewhere. In July 2010 it launched the "Open Stage" Pilot Scheme, giving performers dedicated venues at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Sha Tin Town Hall and Kwai Tsing Theatre. The scheme ended that December and was not renewed. The reason was simple: too few people used it. The venues were not on the street.

Even before the motion came up on the 24th, some performers had already moved on. Not only because a spot in Mong Kok had become harder to win, but because the quality of the performances and the performers there was falling, which made some groups unwilling to keep playing.

"It seems like the Mong Kok area is now crowded with off-key singers and awkward dancers, which has created general resentment toward performers and ruined our image as a whole," said a member of the group 3jammers. They have moved to a spot under a footbridge in Tsim Sha Tsui. Far fewer people walk past there, of course.

Once the Mong Kok zone is gone, the performances will go with it, and so will the noise they bring. But street performance will exist somewhere. The question just becomes whether to regulate it, and how.

Public Space

This is also a question of how a city uses its open space.

An article in Cultural Studies (《文化研究》), a journal published by Hong Kong's Lingnan University, went through the relevant government announcements and found that Hong Kong began building pedestrian zones systematically with the 1999 Policy Address — the year before the Mong Kok zone was set up. The government's original aims, the article found, included cutting air and noise pollution, easing traffic and making life easier for pedestrians, but also encouraging spending and commercial development. Those aims do not always agree, which raises a question: when pedestrians treat a pedestrian zone as public leisure space, does that clash with the government's hope of using the zone to drive consumption? And when it does, what should be done about it?

Treating the pedestrian zone as public leisure space — as public space — is what produced street performance there.

Performing and watching both require standing still; commerce wants people to keep moving. One side has to stay put, the other has to flow, and conflict follows. The best-known case is the Mr. Funny mentioned above, Su Chunjiu, who has been prosecuted twice. The first was in 2006, when he performed fire-breathing on Sai Yeung Choi Street South and was charged under the Summary Offences Ordinance with "playing a game or engaging in an amusement to the annoyance of others"; the prosecution later dropped the charge. The second was in 2011, in the pedestrian zone on Great George Street in Causeway Bay, where his act was charged as obstruction. The court acquitted him, finding that what he did still fell within the "other cultural activities" covered by Article 34 of the Basic Law. The magistrate said: "Although Hong Kong is not London and Causeway Bay is not Covent Garden, given Hong Kong's level of material culture, I believe it can accommodate this kind of limited obstruction."

But Hong Kong is not London. According to a report from the Hong Kong think tank Civic Exchange, open space in urban Hong Kong came to 2.7 square meters per person in 2016, and under 0.6 square meters in Mong Kok; Shanghai's figure falls between 5.8 and 7.6 square meters. A report from the London Borough of Camden — a large borough north of the Thames that takes in the central districts of Bloomsbury, Holborn & Covent Garden and King's Cross — put the borough's open space at 8.6 square meters per person in 2013 (leaving out one outlier of 37.2), and at 7.7 square meters per person in its central area, those three core districts. Holborn & Covent Garden had 7 square meters per person, 12 times Mong Kok's figure.

The comparison may be a little unfair — the population densities are very different. Density and open space per person are not independent variables.

Say we define a district's level of public-space provision as open space divided by total area. The Civic Exchange report gives no detailed area figures, so we can compare the two districts by taking the ratio of their population-density ratio to their open-space ratio. Take two districts of similar size: Holborn & Covent Garden and Mong Kok, 1.2 square kilometers against 1 square kilometer. The first has a population density of 10,840 people per square kilometer. The second has nearly 130,000, 12 times as many.

Twelve times against twelve times: a ratio of 1. By our definition, the two districts are at about the same level of public-space provision. But the difference between 0.6 square meters a person and 7 is enormous.

It comes back to too many people and too little land. In a 2012 speech, Carrie Lam — then Secretary for Development, now Chief Executive — said that of Hong Kong's 1,100 square kilometers of land, only 23.6% has been developed; 46% is country parks and special areas under statutory protection; and the 30.4% that could still be developed is geologically hard to build on.

With so little usable land in total, one answer, besides managing the city's existing public space more carefully — the Mong Kok pedestrian zone, say — is to create new public space inside Hong Kong. But the more "gentrified" plans risk losing touch with the ground.

In 2013 the West Kowloon Cultural District (part of Yau Tsim Mong), budgeted at HK$20 billion, covering 0.4 square kilometers and more than a decade in the planning, broke ground. Its theaters, museums and large exhibition venues are due to be finished in stages before 2030.

Feng Jingxing, an architect and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts who has held posts at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in HK01 to criticize this way of building a cultural district: "the cultural life inside the district must have genes that are local, everyday, interactive and spontaneous."

He compared the push to develop West Kowloon with London's Barbican Centre, built in the 1980s. Thirty years of Barbican experience, he wrote, shows that cultural activity paired with luxury housing around it is not a good match — "the residents and the users of the cultural center basically live as if on two different planets."

In theory, open space is not the same thing as recreational space, since the latter can include private land. But under the definitions in Hong Kong's planning standards, recreational space is limited to public land, so in the discussion above the two terms can be used interchangeably.

In The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte argued that public space should encourage civic participation and community interaction, which makes bottom-up design of social space the direction worth pursuing. By his logic, simply scrapping a Mong Kok pedestrian zone that already exists may not be the best move.

Cover image / flickr @Jonathan Brennan