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.
