Research On Use Regulation In Town Planning And Development Administration In Hong Kong

Use is the core element of urban planning.In the process of transformation from traditional urban and rural planning to territorial spatial planning,the central and local governments have issued a number of guiding documents emphasizing the establishment of a sound system of territorial spatial use regulation.Use regulation has gradually developed into an important type of work in territorial spatial planning.Because of the similarity between Hong Kong and the mainland in terms of land system and development management,this paper selects Hong Kong as a case study in the face of the demand for more comprehensive use regulation under territorial spatial planning.The purpose of this paper is to study and sort out the use regulation in town planning and development administration in Hong Kong,in order to understand the functional roles,operational processes and construction methods of each link of the use regulation system in the whole process of urban development better,and to provide a reference for the establishment of a multi-level,multi-scale,interactive and implementation-oriented overall use regulation system that matches with the territorial spatial planning system.From the perspective of change of use,this paper distills the change of use in the process of urban development into four main aspects: existing use,planned use of land,development use of land parcels,and use after completion.This paper firstly sorts out the institutional background of use regulation in Hong Kong,and rationalizes the functions and roles of the Planning Department,the Town Planning Board,the Lands Department,the Buildings Department,and other functional departments and statutory bodies in the development management system of Hong Kong in various aspects of use change.After that,this paper analyzes the definition of "existing use" and "existing use rights" in town planning in Hong Kong with relevant laws and regulations,policy documents and judicial cases as background,and points out that "existing use" in use regulation is a rule established by law for uses that do not comply with the requirements of statutory plans.The author then examines the overall guiding uses and statutory uses at the zoning level for the whole territory and the sub-region in the context of the Hong Kong planning system,focusing on the two main technical tools of the statutory Outline Zoning Plans,namely the use zones and the land use table,and exploring the flexibility and market adaptability brought by the "zoning" approach to land designation and the "grouping" approach to use assignment.Next,the comprehensive regulatory process of land grant and development,which involves the participation of multiple parties,contractual and legal constraints,and the extension from land use to building floor use,is reviewed and analyzed in the light of the land grant documents and development and construction-related plans of several land parcels in Hong Kong.Based on the aforementioned study,the author summarizes the management of changes in site use and building slab use during the normal use of the project in Hong Kong after completion,which echoes the "existing use" in the previous paper.This paper constructs the whole process of use regulation in Hong Kong in both temporal and spatial dimensions,and shows the overall use control system from the perspective of use change that matches the rolling development process of the city.Finally,the paper summarizes the three main features of Hong Kong use regulation,which combine rigidity and flexibility,statutory and contractual constraints,and single-level statutory planning and multi-level non-statutory planning.On this basis,the author further analyzes the three main problems of the current situation of urban use regulation in the mainland.These are confusion between the concepts of "use" and "land use",multiple levels of statutory control with imperfect transmission mechanisms between the upper and lower levels,and a top-down one-way logic that fails to provide space for market choice.Then,three main suggestions are made for the construction and improvement of the spatial use regulation system,namely,changing the designation of uses from "classification" to "grouping",coordinating statutory control with other restraint methods,and improving the extension of land use regulation to building use regulation.