Resort urbanism: The role of Landscape in Hong Kong’s Discovery Bay

Abstract

Hong Kong’s Discovery Bay presents an emergent typology for integrating urban growth at significant densities within a rich topographic condition. A mixed-use development primarily devoted to residences, Discovery Bay manifests commercial success even as the collective project highlights risks in combining urban convenience with landscapes of leisure before more comprehensively establishing the social structures of community. Within the context of an increasingly dynamic Southeast Asia, it is critical that successful, if imperfect, developments like Discovery Bay are investigated as living experiments that may inform future growth patterns throughout the region. As a built work with more than three decades of expansion and inhabitation, DB (as Discovery Bay is colloquially called) is also relevant to designers and planners beyond this territory who may recognize within the development, relationships and ideas worthy of adapting to different climatic and economic contexts.