URBAN PLANNING

Hong Kong is a pretty small place for more than 7 million people, so it's important to plan properly, or everything would fall apart. And in general, the authorities there do it pretty well. We stayed in a part of the city called Sha Tin. Back in the 1950's, the Government realised that it would require more urban areas, so it designated ten (yes, ten) new cities in the suburbs, of which Sha Tin was one. At the excellent Museum of Culture, we saw pictures of Sha Tin at that time, a sleepy village set in rice paddies alongside a river. Today, it is a bustling area of 750,000 inhabitants, as big as Denmark's second city Århus.

But it is not chaotic, like many cities are in India or Africa. The river has been straightened into a kind of rowing regatta, there are cycle paths and jogging tracks along the banks, and lots of parks and other public spaces. Modern metro lines connect the whole thing to the central districts. Yes, there are lots of high-rise apartment blocks. But there is no grafitti, almost no litter or rubbish, and many trees.

The same thing applies in the rest of Hong Kong. The main airport was in the middle of the city, so they built a new one on reclaimed land off the coast of Lantau Island. Planes fly in to the airport from the sea, so there are no irritated residents (contrast that with Heathrow's flight path up the Thames); and there will be no problem with expansion in the future, they would just reclaim more of the sea. Elsewhere, they are building a 50km bridge and tunnel system across the Pearl River delta to Macau, making a high-speed train link to Shenzhen and Guangdong, and expanding various metro lines. And everything is supposed to be ready before 2017.

The contrast with Europe couldn't be more stark. Expansion at Heathrow and other London airports has been a running sore for decades, and the idea of an airport in the Thames Estuary has been just that for years. The Crossrail project has started, and a decision has been made to build a high-speed train line from London to Birmingham. But both projects have been around for years, and won't be finished for years either. There just doesn't seem to be the same urgency about things over here.

The day after we came back from Hong Kong, the Danish Government announced the demise of its flagship project to introduce a congestion charge for Copenhagen. Not really an infrastructure project on the Hong Kong scale, and now not even a project.

Walter Blotscher