On Saturday, academics from the design schools of The University of Hong Kong and University of California, Berkeley opened an exhibition with a forum at Hong Kong's Central Market:
Trading Bays: Resilience Design Strategies for San Francisco Bay Area and China's Greater Bay Area
As an increasingly mainstream criteria for sustainability, "resilience" refers to the capacity for a system, whether urban or ecological, to function and rebound from disturbances. Trading Bays explores how architects, landscape architects and planners engage with the concept of "resilience" in visioning the future by focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area and China’s Greater Bay Area. The Forum discusses designs and planning proposals generated by students and faculty members of the University of Hong Kong and University of California, Berkeley between 2018 and 2022—a period in which both regions experienced significant shocks to their environmental, political and economic systems. Emphasizing that resilient strategies must not be based on simplified notions of technical efficiency, exhibited projects simultaneously push the limits of our physical environments while testing our capacities to govern and regulate diverse urban, landscape and coastal systems.
- Exhibition: 25 March to 10 April 2023
- Venue: G/F, Central Market, Interactive Wall Area

Ashley and four former HKU Master of Landscape Architecture students exhibited speculations on Hong Kong's environmental futures:
Environmental Futures: Engaging development through critical landscape planning in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area
未來環境—透過香港及大灣區的批判性景觀規劃引領發展
The works exhibited here are speculations on where landscape science and urban planning will be within the next decade. The emergence of new technologies for assessing, predicting, and monitoring landscape and ecological change signals a potential governance transition from the "environmental state" (生态立州) to the "predictive state". Predictive technologies are now prominent in applied landscape sciences and are leading towards the automated management and securitization of conservation landscapes. These advancements in technology are accompanied by powerful new collaborations between scientists and state planning agencies, such as in China's Ecological Redline Policy (生态红线), which are extending our planning institutions' remit into sensitive non-urban landscapes and socio-ecological systems. How will urban planners and ecologists come together to create the predictive state in the Greater Bay Area? Our ability to predict landscape change and thus ensure landscape resilience are converging but not without significant implications for environmental regulation, for data archiving and transparency, and for democratic participation and representation in development. These exhibited works each argue that landscape architects have an important role to play in negotiating between development-driven urban planning and conservation-oriented ecological science. These works explore how we predict and envision landscape resilience, including through ecological baselines, forecasting, backcasting, and future scenario-building. They deploy innovative strategies, such as: alternative value systems in the prediction of urban or rural ecosystem services and ecological corridors; and novel forms of social and environmental impact assessment, citizen science, and public engagement and deliberation. For Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, recent proposals to develop lands of conservation value, such as country parks, necessitate new planning and design tools that not only aid ecological assessment but also simultaneously raise awareness of the negotiated ecologies of these landscapes. The works exhibited here approach this both from the outside, meaning applying theory and methods rarely brought to bear on these landscapes, and from within the technologies we use to value the environment.
這裡展出的作品是對未來十年內景觀科學和城市規劃的推測。評估、預測、監管景觀和生態變化的新技術的出現,預示著從 「生態立州」到「預測立州 」在治理上的潛在轉變。現時的預測技術在應用景觀科學中備受關注,可促進景觀保育的管理自動化和提供長遠保護。伴隨著科學家和國家規劃機構之間有力的新型合作——例如中國的生態紅線——這些科技的進步正將我們規劃機構的職權範圍擴展到敏感的非城市景觀和社會生態系統。城市規劃師和生態學家將如何共同創立大灣區的「預測立州」?我們預測景觀變化從而確保景觀延續性的能力正在趨同;但與此同時,對環境監管、數據檔案管理、數據透明度、以及對於發展的民主參與度和代表性,卻亦有著重大影響。這些展出作品分別論證了景觀建築師在發展趨動的城市規劃和保育導向的生態科學之間的談判中可以發揮重要作用。這系列作品探討我們如何預測和構想景觀韌性,包括通過研究生態基線、預測、回溯和建構未來情景。他們採用了創新的策略,例如:在預測城市或農村生態系服務和生態連廊方面提出不同價值觀;以及新形式的社會和環境影響評估、公眾參與的科研和商議。對於香港和大灣區來說,近年有關開發具潛在保護價值的土地(如郊野公園)的建議需要新的規劃和設計工具。這些工具不僅應該促進生態評估,同時也應提高對這些景觀的協商生態的認識。這裡展出的作品既從「外在」的這些鮮被探討的理論和方法出發,又從我們用來評核環境的技術的「內在」著手。
Exhibited works:
- "Slow Science in Development: Ensuring principled ecological auditing for the Smart Earth era in Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis" by Hui Chun Sing
- "Conservation Watch: Nuanced modelling approaches for adaptive management of Hong Kong’s conservation landscapes" by David Shum Siu Kei
- "Modulating Landscape Connectivity: Applying the gradient paradigm to modelling, design and management of Ecological Redlines in the Greater Bay Area" by Cindy Lai Chuxuan
- "Making an Environmental Authority: Development, negotiation and the technical production of agricultural land under Hong Kong New Agriculture Policy" by Ceas Chong Yan Suen







Posted by: Ashley Scott Kelly (ashleyscottkelly.com)