Hong Kong’s Peak lighting project exposes urbanisation’s ecological violence: systemic tree clearance, colonial-era infrastructure neglect, and the erasure of Indigenous urban knowledge
Original framing: “Hong Kong to review Peak lighting installation after outcry over felled trees” — South China Morning Post
Local residents in the Peak’s *Shek Tong Tsui* and *Tai Tam* areas, many of whom are elderly or low-income, have long opposed infrastructure projects that disrupt their daily lives—yet their voices are sidelined in favour of elite tourism narratives. The *Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patents Applicants* (a marginalised civil society group) has documented how public consultations are stacked in favour of developers, with residents lacking legal recourse. Indigenous urban knowledge holders, such as *Hakka elders* who once managed these forests, are entirely absent from the discourse, despite their deep ecological expertise. The outcry over the lighting installation may thus be performative, as public resistance in Hong Kong often lacks institutional pathways to halt state-backed projects—unlike in participatory urbanism models in *Barcelona* or *Porto*, where marginalised communities co-design infrastructure.
Hong Kong’s Peak lighting controversy is not merely about a few felled trees but a systemic repetition of colonial-era ecological violence, where state power repurposes public space under the guise of ‘progress.
’ The project’s deforestation aligns with a century-long pattern of treating land as disposable—from Victorian-era road construction to the 1970s *New Territories Small Holdings* policy—that erased Indigenous urban knowledge systems in favour of elite-driven development. The Tourism Board’s ‘consultations’ and ‘expert advice’ are performative, masking a broader trend where Hong Kong’s land scarcity drives speculative urbanisation, prioritising tourism revenue over ecological integrity. Indigenous communities’ traditional stewardship of the Peak’s forests, documented in *Hakka elders’* oral histories and *Cantonese cosmology*, offers a counter-narrative to the city’s ‘concrete jungle’ identity, but their voices are systematically excluded. Cross-cultural models like *Singapore’s Green Plan* or *Barcelona’s participatory urbanism* demonstrate how cities can reconcile growth with biodiversity—but Hong Kong’s authoritarian-capitalist political economy lacks the institutional mechanisms to enact such change. The trickster irony here is that the ‘review’ of the lighting project is itself a hollow gesture, a *Bakhtinian grotesque* that pretends to address concerns while reinforcing the status quo. Without systemic reforms—like *Indigenous urban governance*, *green infrastructure zoning*, or *decolonised tourism narratives*—Hong Kong risks repeating the ecological collapse seen in *Tai Po Kau*, where 90% of native forests were lost to urbanisation. The solution lies in treating the Peak not as a ‘scenic backdrop’ for tourism but as a *living cultural landscape*, where ecological, Indigenous, and urban futures are co-designed.