Back to the Loop: A reading of opposing visions for the future of Lok Ma Chau

As Hong Kong and Shenzhen citizens are becoming more and more integrated in their daily lives and work, education has increasingly become an important issue in the cooperation between the two cities. A great opportunity is represented by the Lok Ma Chau Loop and Hong Kong’s boundary closed area. Here it is envisioned the project for the San Tin Technopole, with a dense development corridor realized along Lok Ma Chau BCP and its connecting roads, while the Loop itself would host high value-added/hi-tech production activities and R&D facilities. Why reduce education to such a limited scope (highly specialized research) and area, when such a unique opportunity opens the way for innovative scenarios? In this essay the vision for the San Tin Technopole is compared with the “Learning Cloud”, a project developed by the Italian office Salottobuono for the Lok Ma Chau Loop in 2009 and exhibited in the frame of the third edition of the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in that same year. The “Learning Cloud” engaged with a scenario of counterurbanization in the Pearl River Delta context. Counterurbanization intended not simply in terms of transition from dense to more dispersed forms of settlement, from urban to rural, but also from a strictly normative social structure to a more casual one, open to chance and the unforeseen.