The final colonial regional plan that lingers on: Hong Kong's Metroplan

•The research provides a review of a sub-regional plan after 25 years.•The paper is based on rare and reliable government information.•It sets the plan against a broader international context.

Metroplan, a strategic regional planning strategy formulated by Hong Kong's planners prior to 1997, constellates a multitude of contradictions in planning objectives which, with the benefit of hindsight, are more influential than critics at the time would believe. These contradictions included the conflicts between the market's demand for intensifying development and the government planner's desire to reduce density; elitist bureaucracy; and capital accumulation versus communitarian aspirations under restricted representative democracy. As a result, the core planning objective of ‘thinning out’ urban densities in the older Metroplan areas was never realized. In spite of its limitations, Metroplan survives in more recent plans for Hong Kong in terms of the government's planning apparatus, academic literature, planning methods, and planning vocabulary.