Hong Kong - Shenzhen Duo-city Evolution and the Future Integrated Development

Funding Organization: Chinese University of Hong Kong - Direct Grant
Principal Investigator: Jiaxiu Cai
Duration: 06/2025 - 06/2026

One area, two cities With the return of sovereignty to the Central Government in 1997, policy, kinship and business ties have facilitated more integration in the region under the overall principle of "one country, two systems” (OCTS). The year 2003 was a watershed of the Hong Kong government's position and attitude. It is when the Hong Kong government began to take a positive stance towards crossboundary cooperation, giving rise to a government-led strategy for regional integration (Shen & Luo, 2013). Since 2015, the concept of "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area" was proposed as a development policy, signaling a new stage of integration attempt between Hong Kong and the Mainland. In 2019, the Outline Development Plan for Guangdong-Hong KongMacao Greater Bay Area, long conceived and paved by the Central government, was formally announced, and this Mega-regional development strategy entered the full implementation stage (State Council, 2019). When focused on the study and forecast the development of GBA, Hongkong and Shenzhen are the critical centers of the region. They are also the bordering cities of the OCTS policy directly colliding with. Hong Kong and Shenzhen have been the most important regional development poles due to their unique institutional advantages and location advantage. With the Internal Grant rise and development of globalization, the relationship between Hong Kong and Shenzhen has been undergoing a dynamic scale reconstruction from the early days of " front shop, rear factory " model to the later of " Hong Kong-Shenzhen metropolis". Hong Kong has been closely related to Shenzhen since ancient times, rooting in the same cultural system. The earliest relationship can be traced back to the activities of the Baiyue tribes in the Neolithic period. Afterwards, the two places were under the jurisdiction of the same county during the Qin, Han, Eastern Jin and Tang dynasties. In the Ming Dynasty, the county was named Xin'an(新安縣) County, with its capital set up as Nantou, under the administration of Guangzhou Prefecture (Peter Y.L. Ng, 1983). However, in modern times, with the start of the Opium War in 1840 and the cession of Hong Kong Island by the defeated Qing government, the partition of Hong Kong and Shenzhen began. With the signing of the 1840 Treaty of Nanjing, the 1860 Treaty of Beijing and the 1898 Treaty on the Extension of the Boundary of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories were successively removed from the jurisdiction of the Xin'an County and became a British colony. Since then, Shenzhen and Hong Kong have embarked on two different development trajectories that have lasted for 100 years. The integrated development of Hong Kong and Shenzhen has long been a hot topic. The duo-city perspectives have been developed in terms of urban economy, industrial division, policy, and city management. From the economic and industry perspective, duo-city economic cooperation (Yuan, 2021), cross-border education (Leung & Waters, 2021), crossborder innovation (Wang et al., 2021), etc. was fully discussed. From the politic and management perspective, relevant studies include government-led strategy for regional integration (Shen & Luo, 2013), smart city management (Govada et al., 2022), and intercity corporation governance models (Zhang et al., 2021), etc. However, the holistic study of the two cities from the morphological perspective is less explored. Prior to 1840, the Hong Kong Shenzhen border region, as we know it today, ceases to exist. The landscape in this area that ecologically developed as one single organism, the infrastructure network was integrated constructed, and the built-up area was following the same pattern.

After one-century different development trajectories, the questions arise:

Q1: How did Hong Kong-Shenzhen develop and evolve morphologically? What are the spatial structural elements that lead to such a clear difference between the two sides of the border?
Q2: How did the urban planning of Hong Kong and Shenzhen evolve during the historical development and what was its driving force in shaping the urban form?
Q3: How did the driving force of urban planning influence continuous spatial structural elements that shaped the distinctive urban form of Hong Kong and Shenzhen?

This study will serve as the kick-off for a series of planning policy and morphological study of Hong Kong-Shenzhen. It provides a morphological interpretation of the two systems in the same region at multiple levels. This morphological asset of the research is crucial for urban planning practice and urban design research. It provides insights and reveals mechanism of Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s urban form. Furthermore, the resulting toolkit also assists HK-SZ future integrated development.

Figure: Theoretical Framework of the Research