Hong Kong remains the world leader in vertical urban development, a new report has found.

Shortly before Christmas, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s City Advocacy Forum released the 2024 edition of its Vertical Urbanism Index.

The index examines the relationship between tall buildings, high density and liveability evaluated through social, economic and environmental considerations.

It currently evaluates three dozen cities. Each city is assigned a comparative score between 0 and 10 for each of the aforementioned categories.

Overall, the report found that Hong Kong topped the charts with an aggregate score of 21.98.

This was followed by Toronto-Hamilton (19.74), New York (16.71), Tokyo-Yokohama (14.49) and Singapore (14.03).

(data source: Vertical Urbanism Index 2024, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat City Advocacy Forum)

 

Whilst Hong Kong achieved a low score of 4.69 in terms of liveability, it achieved high scores of 9.22 and 8.07 for density and the number of tall buildings respectively.

The city’s liveability score has been impacted over recent years as political tensions have risen and freedom of expression has been curtailed.

As a result, the city slumped from 17th in 2013 to 77th in 2023 in terms of liveability rankings out of 500 cities worldwide in a separate assessment by global mobility expert ECA International.

Despite this, the city retains reasonable livability features. These include good facilities, good infrastructure, a wide range of recreational options and low crime rates.

Meanwhile, the city retains its lead in terms of vertical urbanism on account of its large number of tall buildings and its high degree of urban consolidation.

With 550 buildings of more than 150m in height, Hong Kong has more tall buildings than any other city in the world.

This includes six buildings of greater than 300 meters in height. The tallest of these is the 108 storey (484m) International Commerce Centre which was completed in 2010.

The city also has a population density of 6,837 people per square kilometres.

At this level, Hong Kong has less than half the density compared with Tokyo (15,499 per square kilometre) and only just over half of the density compared with New York City (11,316 per square kilometre) but has greater density compared with Toronto (4,435 people square kilometre) and fifteen times the density of Sydney (431 people per square kilometre).

(Standing at 484m in height, he 118 storey International Commerce Centre completed in 2010 is the tallest building in Hong Kong and the 13th tallest building in the world. Image source: ‘Art in Context https://artincontext.org/international-commerce-centre-in-hong-kong/)

Scores in respect of the CTBUH rankings are derived from an analysis of metrics.

These include:

  • Geographic dispersion
  • High-rise/density correlation
  • Urbanized population (% of national total)
  • Social benchmarks, including life expectancy and educational attainment
  • Environmental data, such as urban sprawl, air quality (PM2.5 exposure), and access to rapid transit and public spaces; and
  • Economic metrics, among numerous others.

Apart from Hong Kong, scores in respect of tall buildings tend to be weighted in favour of Chines cities as Hanghzhou and Guangzhou-Forshan-Shenzen.

However, livability scores tended to be higher in cities in developed countries. These include Tokyo, Singapore, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Tel Aviv (despite the Israel/Gaza war), Vancouver and Osaka/-Kobe-Kyoto.

 

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