Governing Hong Kong's Public Realm: Perceptions, Expectations and Strategic Performance

The urban public realm includes all spaces which anyone can normally freely access, even if time or conditional restrictions exist - parks, open spaces, streets, housing estates, and privately owned public spaces. An effective public realm is essential for urban life. City governments strategically manage the public realm, to ensure its benefits are ‘appropriately’ distributed between its multiple stakeholders. To achieve this requires coordinating service delivery mechanisms managed by multiple organizations – ‘police’,‘street cleansing’ and ‘transport’. This is a major challenge and requires not simply cross-departmental cooperation but strategic goal-setting and leadership. Hong Kong’s public realm complexity, congestion, and lack of transparent decision making, makes the challenge acute. The research will identify, in Hong Kong, issues in the public realm important for its users, why they value those aspects, and what the perceived performance in those aspects are. Deploying the technique of Value Network Analysis (VNA) in an innovatively adapted form, we will examine how government roles, mechanisms and actions affect that performance in selected important aspects.A four-stage multi-method qualitative research design is adopted. Stage 1 Literature Review will identify the performance dimensions of public space governance regimes in selected cities, and investigate recent public realm developments in Hong Kong. Stage 2:Focus Groups will identify Hong Kong-specific performance dimensions, and the perceived performance in each dimension. Stage 3: Four Case Studies will analyze in depth selected dimensions which are important but currently perform poorly, and thoroughly investigate this for four contrasting locations. Stage 4: Action research workshops with key government departments will both inform the research design and share interim findings while obtaining data on the value network on the ‘service production’ side.The intellectual contribution of this research is twofold. First, the use of VNA to attribute public realm ‘performance’ to governance roles, mechanisms and actions in Hong Kong, is new. Second, the use of VNA refines the theory on which its use is based, a practical ‘value theory of public realm governance’, where governance = ‘management of the distribution of values’.Governance impacts are built into the methodology from the outset. Involving government actors in this action research can be a basis of a much-needed mechanism for dialogue between government and citizens about city management. The research reframes governance processes to focus on providing a user-focused service encounter, prioritizing what users value, rather than management organizations’ administrative convenience.