The Social and The Spatial, Urban Models as Morphologies for a ‘Lived’ Approach to Planning

Cubic Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Work may be copied, shared and distributed when authors are properly accredited; this includes outlines of any work. Amendments to the original work needs to be shown. The licensor does not in any way endorse third party views or how journal content is used by others. How to Cite APA Bruyns, G. (2018). The Social and The Spatial, Urban Models as Morphologies for a ‘Lived’ Approach to Planning. Cubic Journal, 1(1), 5273. http://dx.doi.org/10.31182/cubic.2018.1.003

How and in what manner has the social been instrumental in formulating planning policies, and, does Hong Kong ascribe to any social concept that facilitates its current spatial planning framework?The legacy of the social in planning originally came to fruition within the Chicago School of Social Sciences during the early 1920's.Since then, the understanding of the social and how planning responds to the social has been wide and varied.This paper examines the social's application in spatial notions in addition to its context within Hong Kong.At its core this argument outlines the consequences of a social notion within planning and the spatial modes of recourse.Issues of scaling are brought into question when addressing planning as well as economic focus, in both the local as well as regional governance levels, which further emphasises the dynamic proxies of social and spatial factors for territorial planning.Having neither of these, the argument then highlights the realities of economic asymmetries in the disempowerment of a local populous through land speculation and housing shortages.

Social models and the link to the urban
A question that is still of significance in the contemporary urban discourse is, "How and in what manner have social issues been instrumental in formulating planning policies?"Additionally, "Does Hong Kong ascribe to any social concept that facilitates its current spatial planning framework?"Since the turn of the 20th century sociology has played an active role in understanding the city structure and urban development through the work of sociologists, Ernest Burgess (1886Burgess ( -1966) ) and Louis Wirth (1897Wirth ( -1952)), amongst others.
As a guiding premise, their respective takes on the city as a social form -in its distribution, order, arrangements, and class system -has forever fused the social with the city, in either of their ecological understanding of the city and its analysis (Burgess, 1928) or in a broader understanding of urbanisation as spatial-technical entity (Wirth, 1938).Adapted by other disciplines, the socio-spatial perspective of the city resonates in discourses such as urban morphology, urban geography, and spatial planning in their respective attempts to align the social with urban form, geographic conditions, or planning instruments (Lin &Mele, 2013 andFyfe &Kenny, 2005).
Since Burgess' original land use model, several variants have further investigated urban organisation through an understanding of the social, each of which produced distinct conceptual anchors for analysis.The models of Hoyt (1939), Mann (1965), Ulman and Harris (1965) have in each instance advanced the understanding of the social, as a technology of living, and extrapolated it to larger scale planning propositions.The sideby-side comparison of the socio-economic with that of the spatial defines urban typologies and developmental trends that are shared between each of these methods.
Although these models advanced the understanding of urbanisation, the same models have since received blame for both their social and spatial misconceptions, and for inspiring flawed spatial ideologies (Fishmann, 1977;Vanstiphout, 2008;Watson, 2009;Low;2012).To this effect, the rise of asymmetrical social landscapes (Kaminer, 2010), the splintering of the city (Graham & Marvin, 2001), and a misreading of social agency (Simone, 2014) has, at the hand of top-down planning, established the misgivings of the creative, organic, and sustainable city paradigms.This forced many to take a counter stance against rigid forms of development in favour of emergent attitudes in planning (Pinilla-Castro, 2010). 1   This paper focuses on the question of what happens when there is no definable link between the social and spatial of the city.What occurs when planning overlooks the social?To do so I wish to use Burgess' Concentric model as a point of departure to reflect on the understanding of how the social has been used to define a formal language of urban analysis.Secondly, to question the translation of these social models in contemporary terms.More specifically, in the Hong Kong context, to show how the idea of the 'social' is disembodied between social thinking and spatial planning.

Reading the social as form
Ernst Burgess proposed an empirical framework to industrialize cities of the 1920's.The initial model, and its variations dated 1924The initial model, and its variations dated , 1925The initial model, and its variations dated and 1927, kept , kept to a city that conformed within a concentric arrangement and radiated from the central pointor in contemporary terms the Central Business District (CBD)-outwards.As a faculty member of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, one of the leading sociology institutions at that time, Burgess aimed to articulate biological concepts, or social ecology, in urban terms.In this framework,

Gerhard Bruyns
ecology and its application in the social sciences placed emphasis on communities in terms of the geographic interpretation of ethnicity, class, and social policy, a taxonomy of a social species of sorts.(Harding and Blokland;2014, 44-45).
In a formal sense, Burgess's model consisted of five concentric rings.Each concentric ring formed a successive zone to the previous.Individual rings were allocated to a specific social class that related to economic dispersion and urban functions.The economist Homer Hoyt's empirical model extends Burgess' notions by operating from within zones and quadrants, and is aptly termed the Sectoral model (Pacione, 2005: 144).This model relies on a survey of rent gradient in American cities, and expresses a spatial landscape in five basic sections: 1) a CBD; 2) high-income housing; 3) middle income housing; 4) low-income housing; 3) lower class residences; 4) wholesale; 5) CBD; 6) industrial suburb; 7) residential; and 8) heavy residential.
Using British medium-sized towns as cases (Huddersfield, Nottingham and Sheffield), the model collapses the characteristics of a concentric town with sectoral principles, and wedges-off functional zones that intersect the concentric structure.| 63 As such these models becomes indicative of a specific response to spatial concepts.In support, they clarify the use of planning mechanisms that help steer territorial governance, regional programming, and neighbourhood design for social longevity.The co-dependencies between the social, spatial planning, and design, whether at the scale of the metropolitan structure, neighbourhood, urban block, or dwelling typology, therefore remains part and parcel of the same challenge.

Over prescription of the 'social'
The application of social models as planning instruments does present problems.Lee (1994;35) highlights the use of the model's inability to disentangle issues, thus operating as a black box phenomena, which questions their impact within design.Lee further alludes to why social models affect planning practices to such an extent, when he comments on planning's, then archaic, practice and praxis as an ideal testing ground for other types of influence.
The modern project's socially specific agenda inadvertently established spatial doctrines that promoted the social.Le Corbusier's The City of Tomorrow and its planning (Etchells, 1971), Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City (1932), and the Ebenezer Howard's Garden City (1898), were not only exemplary in their utopian ideologies, they each promoted the rise of the new bourgeoisie (Fishman, 1977).In each instance ideology was themed and then further translated into a form language, held together by comprehensive functional programmes and their prescriptive social structures.
Cities were analysed and planned according to

Social-spatial frameworks and the Hong Kong SAR
How is this link between the social and the spatial made in the context of Hong Kong?Social-spatial planning still remains vague in terms of planning.
The Special Administrative Region (SAR) 9 has always been a "market city" (Ohno, 1992)

Hong Kong's missing link
Ng (Ng, 1986, 23) states that Hong Kong's planning system, has always been inconsistent and fragmented since its conception.Presently, territorial planning is strategised at two-tier, (i) territorial and (ii) sub-regional, scales (Hong Kong Year  promote other means of mobility remains vague in its impact on the social equality of the city (Burton, 2000;19).The modes of compression felt in both domestic and commercial spaces, reaching levels of fifty square feet per individual (Tsoi, 2013, Bruyns, 2016)  Irrespective of Hong Kong's social future, or whether it commences it social strategies from the models of Burgess, Hoyt, or Mann, the SAR is required to take stock of its social if it deems its "two-systems-one-country" spatial incentive to extend beyond 2047; a social-spatial framework for the SAR territory, and beyond, based on a lived approach to planning and through its social dimension.
1. Pinilla Castro's thesis defines two main aspects in planning.The first refers to regulatory or planned forms of spatial strategizing and its specific instrument of management, control, and its focus to produce exact projections that define as well as predict final outcomes.'Emergent attitudes', in direct opposition to planned approach, refer to how place making is not pre-determined by experts, nor at any of the national or municipal planning levels.They emerge as a by-product, out of a collection of public or private actions that shape urban landscapes.(2008; pp ii).
2. The original proposal was made in a paper entitled; "The Nature of Cities".
3. A later model proposed by Vance (1964) elaborates on the formal characteristics of urban centre emerging in an open territory, wherein a variety of commercial centres and business districts are located.Vance's model remains an extension to Ullman and Harris' model yet with a more informative take on urban form, process and culture.See: Vance, 1964. 4. The Isolated State model deemed one's own actual position within the city significant.Important city functions, better housing conditions and most activities of public life 'centred' on these settlement points, associated with production.
5. Central Places Theory operates on the premise of equal distribution of functions, distances of formations and static locations to each settlement.As theory, it relies heavily on the distinctions between centre and peripheral geographies, and less on the social conditions of cities or urbanization as process in its own right.The method imposes a hierarchical order upon certain important settlements and their field of influence.A "centre-to-place" relationship is graphically depicted as interlocked hexagons.
As such, each zone was indicative of specific functions that included production, places for living, and places for commuting.Social distribution conformed to a similar hierarchy.In comparison, urban centres of preindustrial cities that preceded Burgess' model indicated places that were dedicated exclusively to noblemen or the social elite.In the industrial urban form to which Burgess' model ascribes, the most exterior ring of the model was claimed by those who had the means to commute between their dwellings and city centre.Wealthy social classes migrated daily between the city centre and residences far beyond the original boundaries of the old city, due to inner urban squalor, neglect, and conditions of overcrowding.The CBD, at the heart of the circular form, remained the centre of the economic, cultural, and political life.The CBD itself contained an inner core surrounded by zones of industry that were adjacent to working-class neighbourhoods.Credited as a normative model (Haggett and Chorley, 1967), Burgess' proposals simplified urban complexity for the American city.The concentric notion highlighted an unavoidable condition of the industrial landscape, in its methods of growth, and its steady consumption of the landscape through extensive suburbanisation.Each zone is clarified under its own cultural traits and behavioural attitudes, and highlight the existence of types of communities.Burgess' model is negatively critiqued for its ideological intent.(Lin & Mele, 2013: 3).First, the model is geographically critiqued for its formulation on isotopic planes, ignorant of the actual geographic landscape in which cities emerge.Industrial areas that contain mixed functions or dwellings were incorporated with the predominant function of that zone.Secondly, the model demonstrated clear differences between the social complexity of industrial cities, in comparison to the prevalent social hierarchy in preindustrial settlements.With the social elite's abandonment of the inner-city areas, and the subsequent inversion of social hierarchy, the model failed to fuse specific conditions with a broad and generic model.Thirdly, the lack of insight into the forms of engagement between individual and various groups, highlight the blind-sidedness of jointly interpreting the social as a product of urban economies (ibid) or their clustering effect.Fourthly, the emphasis placed on the complexity of suburbanisation, and the impact it had on the urban hinterland, avoided the interrogation of spatial development; spatial patterns of use or developmental tendencies, either morphologically or in terms of typologies of use.And finally, criticism on the model highlights its obsession with biological ideology.The omission of political manipulation, choice structures, and other urban processes overlooked additional influences that may or may not impact social clustering, including land use, gentrification processes, or the way negotiations occur between parties (Ruiz-Tagle, 2013).To this effect, Burgess' approach to the social as an ecology saw inequality, urban poverty, crime, and segregation as necessities for the longevity of urban areas.Subsequent to Burgess' model, the proposal put forward in the form of the Sectoral model of Homer Hoyt (1939), Sectoral and Concentric model of Peter Mann (1965) and Multiple Nuclei model by Chauncy Ulman and Edward Harris (1945) extends | 55 Burgess' thinking through revised social-spatial propositions.Overall, in each case the formulation of the alternatives demonstrate the influence that the economic and social conditions of the city had in the various attempts to define the core essence of urbanisation.
and 5) a wholesale sector.The model ref lects how homogenous (residential or non-residential) sectoral wedges grew outwards from the inner centre or core.More importantly, a concurrence was noted in the model, especially for the larger and more extensive wedges, that spread outwards in direct relation to larger and more extensive transportation routes.Ullman and Harris' social-spatial model was termed the Multiple Nuclei model (1945). 2Their model represents a complete alternative to the concentric model which had dominated the formal models of urban structure up until 1945.The Multiple Nuclei model interpreted the city as originating from a verity of urban nuclei. 3Eight nuclei, a combination of social distribution and functional structures, are categorised under: 1) high-class residences; 2) medium class residences; Mann's model held to the CBD as a central point at the heart of the city.His definition of socioeconomic areas that are reflected in his definitions of low-middle-class-sectors, lower-middle-class-sectors and industry sectors are further segregated from one another each with a distinct layout pattern because of this intersection,.Gideon Sjoberg's 1960 work entitled The Preindustrial City, Past and Present, harnesses technology to read urbanisation.Sjoberg, another sociologist, steers Burgess' concepts away from ecological conditions towards the importance of technology in both social and spatial development.Sjoberg's claim is based on definitive configurative characteristics, shapes, sizes, economic, and demographic compositions that mirror social hierarchy and benchmark the preindustrial (pre-1830) and an industrial (post-1830) urban period.Folk, preliterate, or feudal social forms reflect social hierarchy that directly relates to its inherent urban structure (ibid: 7).In addition, the claim is made, that technology becomes a central force in territorial transformations.A shift in technology produced a time-divide that culminated in alternative social and spatial forms.As such, the concepts of transformation, whereby inanimate sources of energy are applied as tools in man's surroundings is effectively credited for transforming the preindustrial age into an industrial landscape spatially, structurally or socially.As an effect, the city, its layout, and configuration mirror the way class structure and upper levels of society arrange the functional orders of the city through available technologies (ibid: pp 9-11).Furthermore, Sjoberg's model hinges on the notion of central and peripheral social-spatial distinctions.The inner core ranks high in terms of social and urban hierarchy as a place of importance, whilst the exterior hinterland
Figure 5 (this and opposite page): The missing link.Relating WalterChristaller's (1933)  Central Place Theory (CPT) to the spatial structures of the Pearl River Delta.In addition, the link between spatial and social planning is brought under question for Hong Kong's practices of social scripting and effectively its blindsided compressed social morphologies.Mixed media drawing.Source: Author.
functional zones that mirrored social ideals in terms of places of work, places of leisure, green spaces, places for heavy and light industry, and places for living based on race and class(Somer,   et.al., 2007).At each scale of planning the social remained on equal footing with that of urban design.The social's relationships to the structural layout, cluster, and patterns of urban formation was interwoven at all levels with the various spatial typologies that echoed into the design of public spaces of the city, function, and operational arrangement.At its extreme, despite its good intentions, its legacy is associated with the over prescription of the social, through devisable planning in the industrial city and subsequent socialspatial models.7One of the most noticeable failures of social-spatial planning in modern history remains the Apartheid model that was implemented during the 1930's by the South African Government.(Steenkamp, 2008).Essentially, this model enforced social and spatial division based exclusively on race.As diagrammed inMorris (1981), it remains a chilling reminder of a social doctrine of planning that scripted all forms of social, spatial, functional, and financial development between 1930 until the early 1980's.With formal characteristics similar to the spatial distribution of Hoyt's Sectoral model, and low density sprawled across a vast landscape, the Apartheid city's spatial language holds to a city structured with a central core and a less significant peripheral edge, all racially scripted(Steenkamp,   op.cit.).Being of a circular shape, the model's inner core is designated as a -white or European -Central Business District (CBD).All other zones are situated in relation to a central and white dominated business core.Wedges of the circular shape, directly adjacent to the CBD, are defined as zones for specific groups of races.These zones are reserved exclusively for white residential areas.A variety of other categories were further classified as part of a framework which laboured exclusivity of several wealthy white zones.Segments were classified based on high, middle, or lower white economic classes.High economic status had one segment alone, furthest from the lower or non-European zones.Middle-class economic segments formed the buffer regions of the city.Lower economic zones acted as intermediary zones.They Gerhard Bruyns were located directly adjacent to the buffer zones and the non-European,or native zones.Buffer zones were emplaced to act as the strips of seclusion within the city, and divided "Europeans" and "non-Europeans"."Non-European" ethnicities, classified as Indian, Coloured, Chinese or Africans, each received an individual quarter within the city.Its implementation was forceful, and utilised planning and infrastructure to its own means.Mayor roads radiated outwards from the CBD, dispersed through specific white residential sectors of the city.Although the model allowed for roads to cut across middle, or high scale economic zones, no roads or mayor routes bisected the non-European zones.Accessibility to and from non-European sectors was only possible via an industrial zone.All roads of the non-European or native sections had to connect to the main access way before being allowed to enter the core regions of any city.Infrastructure therefore became a means to a political end.In times of unrest, main roads and railways were closed off and made inoperative, which halted the flow of black workers directly into the city and forever altered the position of race within South Africa's spatial legacy.In a European context, the failure of such social models is also evident.For Vanstiphout, the example of Amsterdam's Bijlmer, 8 and its wellmeant articulation of spaces and society, misread political conditions against social needs of local inhabitants.As consequence, it effectively produced the Netherlands first "third world city"(Vanstiphout, 2008).Fishmann, (op.cit.),   Vanstiphout (2008), Watson (2009),Davoudi (2009), andLow (2012) address the ineffectiveness of modern ideologies to become more social.The allowances made within free reign, large scale, spatial planning and its manipulation of the social exposed the need to reconceptualise, and remains a failure from an ideological perspective.Schoonraad's thesis (2004)  on the South African city is another case in point, which highlights greater social segregation than integration within the post-Apartheid city.As Heller and Schensul (2010) point out, the continued overemphasis of "macro" scale conditions in spatial planning omits both complexities and conditions of the "micro" forces at play, and delivers only a singular perspective, termed the "local", or its understanding.Using the post-Apartheid model as an example, both Heller and Low articulate the asymmetrical conditions caused through the disconnection of spatial thinking through race, class, and space.With several investigations that either focus on neighbourhoods or on the entire city, the concern remains how to fill the so-called "voids" of scalar planning, and realign competing rationalities between that of the modern and of the local(Watson, op.cit.; pp 151, Low, op.cit.).
driven by economic directives in which planning had to find symbiosis.In its physical expression it remains a landscape that embraces amplified levels of excessiveness, and has allowed manic density to materialise in vertically stacked urban infrastructure.Yeh (2006) andLin (2011) both question Hong Kong's future under the one-countrytwo-system policy.The gradual, yet consistent, "emptying out" of manufacturing services since the 1980's has forced the SAR to become dependent on speculative land-centred processes that are mechanised for the pursuit of revenue. 10In terms of planning, Hong Kong has not prescribed to any socially aligned planning framework since its proclamation.The colonial outline | 65 plan (COP), enforced between 1965-1974 (Hong Kong Planning Department, 2015; 1), was seen by many as a policy of "indirect rule".As a doubleedged sword, indirect planning policies failed to provide basic services to both locals and colonial expatriates equally.Through its policies, colonial rule emphasised economic development above policies that linked the social with that of the spatial as a means to benefit indigenous communities.Spatially, the system initiated a total land monopoly.Commencing in 1841, all land ownership was retained by the colonial office, which monopolized both the use and users of land.The Crown coffer, with leasing periods ranging between seventy-five to ninety-nine years, generated substantial incomes through the rental and rate taxations.(Mar, 2002; 35).The monopolisation of spatial scarcity de facto mechanised socio-spatial control.High population rates, lack of housing for native dwellers, and overcrowded colonial centres characteristically avoided social concerns, and produced immediate alternatives in the form of architectural solutions.These warehouses of the labouring class (Home 1997, 85) were substituted in place of broader concepts that recognised social and spatial guidelines in planning.Socially, indirect rule resulted in racial hegemony, with the division of urban settlements in either a Chinese or European quarter.Hardly any regulations in place and lack of space ensured the proximity of each social group to one another, often with intangible boundaries separating them.For Philips (op.cit.), Hong Kong's rapid successions of urbanisation forced a society into constant improvisation.A general lack of space and excessive economic pressure meant a continued process of social-spatial adaption, where piecemeal and ad-hoc conditions characterised the spatial incentives at all scales.In addition, intense industrialisation until the 1970's, and the shift to a de-industrialised manufacturing related service economy (Tao & Wong, 2002), placed further emphasized the question of what to plan and through what means.The dependency on architectural types seemed to fill the planning void.The Tong Lau typology (Shelton, et al, 2010) set in place the generic and socially driven shop house prototypes that miniaturised social models at an urban scale.As a direct product of social needs and housing norms during Southern China's industrial surge (Lee, 2010), the shophouse turned an architectural typology into a planning tool.Drawing from the availability of material, customs, and living standards, the Tong Lau institutionalised itself as the operative social-spatial container wherein to work and live, and established a spatial "datum" for neighbourhoods (Shelton, op.cit.).Ironically, this architectural typology is simultaneously credited for Hong Kong's extreme forms of dwelling.Subsequent compression of the Tong Lau typologies resulted in Hong Kong's high density vertical typologies (Ibid).As such, cage homes, internal apartment subdivisions, and rooftop dwellings or beds placed along corridors remain derivatives.The further subdivision of floors as additional rental spaces or the compression of individuals into 2.2 square meter dwellings (Shelton), have in time become social concerns derived as a response to a society's redress against overcapitalised land and limited social foresight within planning.
Book: 2004).The Territorial Development Strategies, or the Hong Kong 2030+: Planning Vision and Strategy, plans regional intentions for both the SAR as well as its relationship within the Pearl River Delta.At the regional scale, two planning instruments take effect-the sub-territorial and district levels defined under the Outline Zoning Plans (OZP), and the Development Permission Area plans (DPA).Independently, these define planning directives and parameters, and harness zonal planning as a primary tool.Further, both express current and forecasted intentions through the means of functional patterns, use, and distribution. 11Still, in either strategies or scales, the aspects, themes, and outlines of the social remain opaque.It is understandable that Hong Kong's planning processes have always had to address a bipartisan scenario.From the mitigation between colonial ordinances and local conditions, to refocussing the territory's spatial alignment with its imminent reunification with mainland China in 2047, Hong Kong has to continuously grapple with centrifugal and centripetal development.In Liu's words (2017, 13): "Hong Kong remains a polycentric morphological model with a mono-functional urban construction".In this case, mono-functional or centrifugal refers to a singular entity and SAR status, as an enclosed and "self-contained" unit, where planning had to devise spatially-specific conditions focussed on Hong Kong itself.The polycentric characteristic refers to the SAR's multi-centrality structure, as a network of clusters and new towns that over time had to establish new links across its own territory as well as with Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Chinese mega centres further afield.Therefore, in a similar light, the question of Hong Kong's social schematic remains a product of this duality.The consistent ebb and flow of Chinese emigrants in relation to its local populous has, in addition, complicated Hong Kong's social projects, and has once again marked its social conditions as mono and poly-ethnic society structures.In effect, the core of what this paper argues pertains to a territory wherein what is understood as the social always finds its alignment, not in social norms nor through spatial models, but in how the social is industrialised through the economic frameworks of value and economic growth.As Ng (op.cit.)argues, the overemphasis of "capital" and value has, in this light, produced planning instruments within, not against, a "capitalist mode of production".Ng continues by stating that the dominant planning model remains "derivative rather than creative" (ibid.; 124), and is meant to maximise private growth and restrict cooperative involvement (ibid.; 125).Whilst planning at the larger scale addresses specifics pressures of urban development, the omission of social models and their respective themes remains a clear oversight in how to strategise for the territory within governance levels themselves.The exclusion within planning to allow for scenarios to rationalise the social, in both spatial and economic terms, deliberately by-passes the importance of the social in both instances of the polycentric as well as monocentric planning incentives.This is felt in several levels.First, the legacy of colonial planning, more specifically its inability to absorb spatial models as mechanisms to instil social progression, emphasises the disempowerment of the social in planning that has sprung form a colonial type.Secondly, morphological expression, architectural typologies, social mobility, dwelling standards (Chi-Man Hui, and Sze-Mun Ho), and spatial configurations purposefully "lock down" social groups and isolate individuals in their miniaturised and fragmented appearance.Within the official stance on "Planning and Urban Design for a Liveable High-density City" (Hong Kong 2030+), spatial allowances in this vision earmarked provisions at the rate of 3.5 square meters and 2.5 square meters per person, which is mostly concentrated in new town development.Once again, these remain statistical and not actual indices that reflect the territories' current realties.
public spaces remains limited when compared to the person-to-open-space ratios that planning currently supports, documented by Tang & Yiu (2010).Thirdly, the broad acceptance within planning guidelines that advocates compact city models as a sustainable model for future development remains a moment of concern.The continued rhetoric that a compact city would reduce car emissions, improve work-life balance, protect natural resources, and systematically remains evidence of an explicit missmatch between how planning incentives spatialise in actual terms that impact human sustainability, social mobility, or any of the "SMART City" ideas that fill planning rhetoric(Smart City Blueprint, 2017).Spatial planning directives contemplate infrastructure and connectivity far above the conditions of user groups.What planning negates, other spaces of the social make up for.A 2015 survey of thirty families in Hong Kong's Sham Sui Po district demonstrated the reliance of the social, not in terms of urban space but through the adjustments made through the urban interior.Meant to establish dwelling patterns, the survey effectively highlighted socio-economic hegemony that was overlooked through planning but dealt with through dwelling standards.Documentation of a) the identity of the inhabitants, b) their ethnic background, c) statutory and residential status, d) living qualities of used spaces, and e) current interior amenities brought to light the contextual conditions of social compression.Each interior demonstrated sharing, appropriation, adaptation, and co-habitation to facilitate a means to survival.Using architecture as mere spatial skeletons, families made use of the interiors to facilitate the sharing of household possessions and living spaces.Hong Kong nationals and Chinese immigrants, co-habituate apartments that were meant for single occupancy sometimes at triple the occupancy rates.Larger apartments were further subdivided to accommodate extended family, sometimes four to five additional members at a time.As an additional source of income, external tenants were taken in to share apartments.Shared kitchens and bathrooms with non-family members caused a hostel type of environment, with make-shift sleeping quarters or bunk beds converted living rooms into sleeping spaces.What could not fit inside each dwelling had to be placed outside.Corridors and hallways were appropriated to become storage, religious spaces, or gathering spaces.Comparable to the subdivisions of existing apartments, rentable rooftop areas provided additional living spaces.Landlords capitalised on this, and used the spaces that technically fall under "illegal structures" in order to generate additional income.Twenty-one of the thirty inhabitants expressed a fear against the powers that landlords hold, as they pay higher rental rates per square foot than elsewhere.In extreme cases, with the lack of affordable accommodation scripted into planning directives, the interiors become a de facto density model that transforms single occupancies into high density living compartments.In such cases apartments operated as hostels, or as spaces where coffin or cage homes(Tsoi, op.cit., Stackle, 2017)  established new social typologies as redress.Co-habitation in these types of interiors, between ten and thirty cage homes per apartment, marked another social extreme, doubling up on the functionality of each space and use.Apart from sharing a basic bathroom and small kitchen, the spaces were stripped bare to allow for the maximum number of "cages" possible, which forced people to share each side of their "home" with another occupant.(Ibid.).And, although well known to Hong Kong dwellers, the mere existence of the cage homes remains a harsh reminder of the failures of planning in 21 st century cities and the inability to strategise the city through the manners in which the social is imprinted into planning models.Moreover, they remain tell-tale reminders of an econometric model that drives planning, trickles downwards, infuses cities, neighbourhoods, city blocks, and architectural typologies, and eventually produces isolated and cramped dwelling typologies.ConclusionsOverall, Hong Kong's social-spatial dilemma presents itself as one that has fallen victim to a spatially competitive model, that over time has disempowered dwellers' ownership within its own territorial model.One key aspect summarise these conclusions here, which draws on the applicability of old frameworks for new problems.Naturally, socially derived planning frameworks of the 20th century remain ineffective in addressing social or spatial challenges characteristical of 21st century urbanisation.The lesson to be drawn from the argument here may be one that calls for the spatial disciplines to re-examine the urban through the social, first and foremost.The challenges placed on the planning systems of being both centrifugal and centripetal in alignment, calls for the re-examination as to how old models find new application in contemporary terms.This is further in support of planning to mechanise instruments as a dynamic process of planning and the instruments necessary for social-spatial projections.Planning models, as such, provide necessary links between the specific and general, the regional and the local, and between the social and the spatial in their visions of possibilities.They form a much required component to strategise, in both the short and long term, irrespective of scale.Concomitantly, such projections represent accountability, and highlight the duality as well as the the pro and cons associated to each system of approach.Yet, lacking such projections orvisions of how these ideas can be made spatial, other forces dominate this process of development.Capitalism, financial competitiveness, spatial compression, and social immobility run their natural and usual detrimental course.

Figure 6 (
Figure 6 (this page): The effects of the 'model' versus the 'lived'.Compressed urban dwellings as a consequence of spatial planning.Source: Author.
6.A whole section in the publication by Somer is dedicated to how the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne or CIAM directed planning and social strategy during its 4th Congress.The chairperson of the time, the Dutch planner Cornelis Van Eesteren, advocated the notion of the "functional city" in terms of planning analysis and design, laying importance on housing, work, leisure, and traffic.SeeSomer, et.al, 2007.Also seeBruyns, 2011; 43for a broader discussion on its implications for urban form.7. See: Le Corbusier's text on "A Contemporary City" in Le Gates and Stout, 1996; 936.8.The Bijlmer area was seen as Amsterdam's test case for applying modern planning ideology to an actual site.Conceived by Van Eesteren, the Bijlmer, became a key satellite city, extending Amsterdam beyond its 17th century confinds, adding to the Berlage's plan for Amsterdam, dated 1914 (Somer, op.cit.).9.The Special Administrative Region is the territorial autonomy of Hong Kong, awarded by The People's Republic of China (PRC) to the territory.As former British colony, the SAR is seen a as part of the PRC yet with different administrative and legislative powers.10.Yeah and Lin both address the transformation of Hong Kong's manufacturing nexus within the Pearl River Delta.Since the 1980's, and China's relaxation of trade policies, Hong Kong has experienced a steady deindustrialisation process.Known for its manufacturing services, Hong Kong's manufacturers, systematically seeped back into the mainland for reasons of affordable labour and materials.In this light, Hong Kong had to readapt its economic premise to a service economy.To this effect, the dependency on land-based revenue systems, where property is capitalised upon, has as an effect, implicated a spatial question to Hong Kong's social future in as much as its affordability and access of adequate housing for all of its citizens.11.For a full description of Statutory plans and Outline Zoning Plans see Schedules of Plans, Planning Department, the Government of the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.Gerhard Bruyns is an architect and urbanist.He is Assistant Professor of Environment and Interior Design, School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.His research deals with the aspects of spatial forms and how this impacts both the formal expression of the city and societal conditions that are compressed into an urban landscape driven by speculation and excess.He has published on design strategies for neoliberal landscapes, exploring what this means for concepts as the 'square foot society' and models of urban dwelling and planning.In 2012 he coedited African Perspectives [South] Africa.City, Society, Space, Literature and Architecture (010 Publishers: R o t t e r d a m) p a r t o f t h e D e lf t S c h o o l o f D e s i g n Publication Series.In 2015 he was co-editor of Issue #16 of Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal entitled: Introduction: Commoning as Differentiated Publicness