Potentials of TDR for Balancing Built Heritage Conservation and Compact Development in Hong Kong

Abstract

Increasing world population has continually stressed the need for intensive but sustainable development. Vertical and high density compact development threat the built heritage conservation, especially the privately owned built heritage. Transfer of development rights (TDR) has been provided as one of the economic incentives by Hong Kong government to encourage the private owner to conserve the built heritage. TDR does not prevent new development when realizing the conservation goals. The research aims to analyze the contribution of TDR for built heritage conservation in Hong Kong from the social, economic, and environmental perspective of sustainable development. Then the research evaluated the implementation of TDR in Hong Kong, supplemented by the local interview to identify the difficulties in implementing TDR. The research found TDR is a proper method with great potentials to deal with the conservation of privately owned built heritage in Hong Kong, however, government support, public support and institutional cooperation should be improved in order to serve better for compact development.