Festival Walk Link Bridge and Campus Entrances: How CityU’s “Shopping Mall as Entrance Portal” Came to Be

City University of Hong Kong (CityU) Comprehensive Information Database · Campus Module 05

In a nutshell: City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has no traditional gate; for daily access, staff and students use a roughly five-minute walk from Kowloon Tong MTR Station through Festival Walk (opened 1998) as their entrance portal.

At most universities you can point to a spot and say, ‘This is the gate’ — an archway, a checkpoint, a pillar, a physical boundary separating campus from city. CityU has no such spot. The closest thing to a ‘main entrance’ is a passageway next to an escalator inside a shopping mall. Every day, students and staff emerge from Kowloon Tong MTR Station into Festival Walk, walk past air-conditioned shopfronts, and then step into their classrooms — the mall is, in effect, CityU’s foyer. This article does not repeat the renovation history and ownership transactions of the link bridge (see the companion piece ‹Transport and Facilities›). Instead it focuses on one question: where did CityU’s ‘shopping-mall entrance portal’ come from, what entrances does it comprise, and how has it, in turn, shaped how CityU people come and go and live their daily lives.

Conventions: Factual claims are sourced inline or in the Sources section. Floor levels, routes, and shop numbers change with mall and campus renovations; refer to the university’s current Transport Guide and on-site signage in Festival Walk for the latest information. References such as ‘affiliated university’ are informal media or community observations; their provenance is noted and they should not be taken as factual assertions.

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# Why Doesn’t CityU Have a ‘Gate’?

CityU’s main campus stands on Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong and is one of the few urban campuses in Hong Kong that essentially ‘sits on top of a mall and next to an MTR station’. It packs teaching, administration, and living functions into several large academic blocks on the Tat Chee Avenue side, linked by footbridges and podium-level walkways (for an overview of campus siting and zoning, see ‹Campus Siting, Geographical Zoning, and Building Directory›). A by-product of this compact layout is that there is no crisp boundary line, hence no place where a ‘gate’ is needed.

Traditionally a university gate serves two functions: a ceremonial ‘façade’ and a regulatory ‘checkpoint’. On CityU’s main campus, both are diluted. For a façade, its ‘face’ is not a gatehouse but the glass curtain walls of Festival Walk and the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly Academic 1). For a checkpoint, entering the campus is a sequence of liminal acts — crossing the mall, walking through a passage, tapping a card at a turnstile — rather than stepping over a single threshold. As the official transport page^※ puts it, the university is ‘adjacent to Kowloon Tong MTR Station and Festival Walk; it takes about five minutes to walk from the MTR station through Festival Walk to the campus^※.’ In official language, the word ‘gate’ does not even appear, replaced by ‘through Festival Walk’.

This explains two popular nicknames. As a mainland Chinese study-abroad media article^※ notes, CityU is called ‘a university inside a shopping mall’; among Hong Kong students, because the campus hugs the eastern side of Festival Walk, it is jokingly called the ‘Festival Walk Affiliated University’. Neither nickname is official — both are informal media or community observations (credibility: anecdotal) — but they point to the same consistently observed fact: at CityU, the mall is what you see before any gate.

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# What Was the Site of This Entrance Portal Before?

To understand why CityU’s entrance portal is a shopping mall, one has to look at what stood on the site before Festival Walk was built. The answer is not ‘university first, then a mall for convenience’, but a slice of urban land-use history that flipped purposes several times.

According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry for Festival Walk^※, the site was earlier the “Chu Ku Chai Village” squatter area, which clung to the hillside stretching from Tat Chee Avenue, To Yuen Street, to Tai Hang Tung Road. After clearance, the government established the Tat Chee Avenue Public Transport Interchange there; the terminus opened on 1 March 1989 and closed on 1 March 1993^※, operating for only about four years, together with an adjacent open-air car park forming a roughly 20,000-square-metre urban plot. Significantly, the bus terminus closed in 1993, shortly after CityU’s Kowloon Tong permanent campus had opened — the campus was already there but the neighbouring land was still uncommitted, setting the stage for ‘a mall built right next to the university’.

After the terminus closed, the government promptly put the site up for tender. According to the English Wikipedia^※, Swire Properties and CITIC Pacific won the site at a 1993 government land auction for HK$2.9 billion^※ on a 50:50 joint-venture basis, invested around HK$2.2 billion in construction costs, and the mall broke ground in 1994 and opened on 13 November 1998^※. In other words, the ground under CityU’s entrance portal went through four successive uses — squatter village → bus terminus → construction site → shopping centre — before settling into the foyer that staff and students now pass through every day. Subsequent ownership changes (Swire bought out the joint venture in 2006, Mapletree took over in 2011, and CityU purchased the office tower in 2026) are covered in ‹Transport and Facilities› and the companion lore-section piece ‹Symbiosis with Festival Walk, the Vertical Campus, and Animal Facilities›, and will not be repeated here.

In this land-use history, a frequently overlooked temporal relationship deserves emphasis: the campus arrived first, the mall later. CityU’s Kowloon Tong permanent campus began opening in the late 1980s to early 1990s (see ‹Campus Siting, Geographical Zoning, and Building Directory› for phasing), while the adjacent plot only came onto the market in 1993 after the bus terminus closed; Festival Walk broke ground in 1994 and opened in 1998. In other words, the mall was planned ‘next to an already existing university’, not the university laid out ‘to complement an already built mall’. That explains why the link bridge treats university traffic as a core customer — the steady footfall from the neighbouring university was always part of the site’s commercial value. The root of the shopping-mall entrance portal lies in this sequence of ‘campus first, mall later, mall built next to the campus’.

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# Was the Link Bridge a Planning Mandate or a Designer’s Choice?

A natural question is whether the pedestrian link bridge from Festival Walk to CityU was a ‘hard requirement’ written into the land sale conditions, or an autonomous move by the developer. This calls for careful treatment, because the popular belief that ‘the government made the mall connect to the university’ is often repeated but rarely substantiated.

Let’s start with what we could not find. After exhaustive searching of public sources, this archive has been unable to obtain the original land lease or 1993 tender documents for Festival Walk, and therefore cannot confirm the existence of an explicit clause requiring ‘a pedestrian connection to CityU’. The English Wikipedia, when describing the link, merely notes that ‘it provides pedestrian connections to City University of Hong Kong^※’ without stating whether this was a lease condition. Where evidence is absent, this archive notes that absence and does not fill it with speculation.

Now for the documented mechanism. Even without an explicit lease clause, the link bridge did not emerge by chance; there is direct design-level evidence. Festival Walk was designed by the American architecture firm Arquitectonica^※, whose project description states that the mall provides pedestrian connections to the adjacent City University of Hong Kong^※ and identifies the university community as a core user group. In other words, from the very first design scheme, ‘serving the university next door’ was part of the mall’s functional brief, and the link bridge was part of the original design, not an afterthought tacked on after opening. A mall built on a former bus terminus, directly plugged into the MTR station, and planned from the start with a connection to the neighbouring university — its location logic itself treats ‘university footfall’ as part of its commercial catchment. It was a case of commercial and planning forces converging, without necessarily needing a mandatory clause.

Thus, the most accurate answer to the question ‘was the link bridge government-mandated’ is: No explicit land-sale clause can be confirmed, but ample design evidence shows the link bridge was part of the original plan, with university staff and students as a core target audience. These two statements are not contradictory — pedestrian connections for urban complexes often result from a dual push of government planning intentions and developers’ commercial calculus.

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# From MTR to Classroom: The Complete Threshold Sequence

CityU’s ‘entrance portal’ is not a door but a route through a mall. Break it down and it becomes a set of ‘liminal segments’ strung together by MTR exits, mall levels, escalators, an underpass, and tap-in turnstiles.

Festival Walk itself is a seven-storey shopping centre with about 980,000 square feet of gross floor area^※, with floors from lowest to highest: MTR, LG2, LG1, G, UG, L1, L2^※, above which sit four office floors. For CityU access, the key is not the busiest G or UG floor but the lower LG1 — where the escalator to campus is tucked. According to the official guide from CityU’s Student Residence Office^※, the standard route is:

‘Exit C2, which leads to the Festival Walk shopping centre. Go up to Level LG1 and find the escalator next to Shop LG1-10.’

Going up that escalator brings you to CityU’s underpass — what students colloquially call the ‘Time Tunnel’ (时光隧道). The name has a double origin: first, the underpass has long been lined with panels displaying milestones from CityU’s history, making the walk feel like flipping through a university chronicle; second, with no direct sunlight and dim sightlines, it carries a metaphorical sense of travelling through time. (For the underpass’s renovation, LED scale, and the unveiling of the ‘Future Innovation Tunnel’, see ‹Transport and Facilities›; this article sets those details aside.) The other end of the underpass opens onto the elevated podium of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, where a red exit door — the ‘red door’ — has become the psychological marker for ‘I’m on campus’. The whole sequence can be summarised in a table:

The most revealing column in this table is ‘Managed by’: in a walk of barely five minutes, staff and students pass through spaces controlled by three different entities — the MTR, the mall owner, and CityU — before they reach their classrooms. A significant physical stretch of CityU’s ‘entrance portal’ does not belong to CityU itself — that is precisely what makes ‘shopping mall as entrance portal’ so distinctive.

# Why LG1, a ‘Lower’ Floor?

A detail easy to overlook is that CityU’s main entrance portal connects not to the mall’s most prominent Ground (G) or Upper Ground (UG) floors, but to the lower LG1. This has to do with the sloping terrain around Kowloon Tong. Tat Chee Avenue and the surrounding area are hilly; Festival Walk, built on a former hillside squatter site, has multiple floor levels that interface with adjoining streets and platforms at different heights — one mall floor may meet a street at grade while another requires escalators and footbridges to reach nearby buildings. CityU’s teaching blocks sit on an elevated podium, and their physical interface with the mall happens to fall at the escalator on LG1: staff and students go up to LG1, then ascend via escalator and underpass to finally meet the podium of Yeung Kin Man Academic Building. According to a Chinese Wikipedia summary^※, Festival Walk has an ‘escalator leading to City University of Hong Kong^※’ — that escalator is the ‘door number’ of CityU’s entrance portal inside the mall. The exact elevation differences between the campus podium and mall floors are not available in authoritative sources and are marked as ‘not found’; only the directional topographical logic is given here, without guessing specific metre values.

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# What Other Entrances Does CityU Have Besides the Mall Route?

Calling the Festival Walk link bridge CityU’s ‘main entrance portal’ is no exaggeration, but it is not the only entrance. The main campus has a distributed set of entry points serving different directions. Understanding this ‘multi-entrance, no-main-gate’ pattern is essential to grasping CityU’s spatial character.

• Festival Walk / Kowloon Tong MTR direction (east side): This is the main portal described above, carrying the vast majority of commuter traffic and the only entrance that is entirely indoors, sheltered from rain and sun. According to the university, it takes about five minutes to walk from Kowloon Tong Station through Festival Walk^※.
• Tat Chee Avenue at ground level: Bus, minibus, and taxi passengers alight on the Tat Chee Avenue side and enter campus from the street. The former Tat Chee Avenue Public Transport Interchange underlies this zone, which remains CityU’s external bus-transfer belt (specific routes are subject to Transport Department and university information).
• Tat Hong Avenue direction: The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre side is relatively self-contained; Creative Media staff and students often enter here, making it CityU’s quieter ‘side door’.
• Cornwall Street direction: CityU’s student residences (over ten blocks in the Kowloon Tong main cluster) are concentrated around Cornwall Street. Residents have their own routes back to the teaching blocks, often via footbridges and passages, different from commuter flows.
• Indoor podium-level connections: Inside the campus, the academic blocks are linked by footbridges and podium walkways, so most inter-building movement does not touch the ground — this indoor-circulation pattern further blurs the question of where the campus boundary lies.

These entrances have no clear ‘main vs. side’ hierarchy and no uniform gate signage. CityU’s entrances are a set of thresholds, not a door: you slip in from whichever direction you come. For new students, wayfinding thus becomes the first lesson of campus adaptation — memorise the escalator on Festival Walk LG1, then gradually work out how to get in and out from Tat Chee Avenue, Tat Hong Avenue, and Cornwall Street.

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# A Campus Without a Gate: How Does CityU Control Access?

‘No gate’ does not mean ‘no checkpoint’. For an open campus that is intimately interwoven with a shopping mall and an MTR station, deciding who can enter and when is itself a spatial governance puzzle. CityU’s solution is to move the checkpoint inward from the door to card-activated turnstiles in its passages and on its floors.

According to the university, access for campus permit holders is 07:00–23:00 daily, and the campus has access control^※. The physical form of this control is the turnstiles and security posts at the underpass mouth and at various floor junctions. This control has not always been so tight — it has experienced one notable tightening and one boundary shift:

This history of control is, in essence, the flip side of ‘shopping mall as entrance portal’: precisely because CityU’s foyer is a publicly accessible mall, it cannot erect a university gate inside the mall, so it has to place the checkpoint in its own property — in the passage and on the floors. This archive will not delve into the post-2019 social context and merely records the factual changes to access control (for juxtaposed sources on related events, see ../18-wilder-movements/source-directory.md). For the spatial question at the heart of this article, one thing is clear: the turnstile position is CityU’s real ‘gate’, and it has been retreating further inside the campus.

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# Other Hong Kong Universities Have Gates — What Does CityU Have?

Placing CityU in a Hong Kong tertiary-institution coordinate grid makes its ‘no main gate, shopping mall as entrance portal’ distinctiveness even clearer. Most of Hong Kong’s major universities have a highly recognisable ‘gateway space’ — a ceremonial face as well as a shared memory-anchor for ‘arriving on campus’. CityU has replaced that gateway with the mouth of an escalator inside a shopping mall. The table below offers a directional comparison using ‘gateway space’ as the axis (the spatial patterns of other universities are matters of public perception and are not a key research focus here, so individual citations are omitted):

By comparison, CityU’s gateway space has two features rarely found elsewhere: first, it does not belong to the university itself — the foyer is Festival Walk, a private shopping mall; second, it has no ceremonial ‘face’ — no gatehouse, no axial plaza, no building that ‘obviously looks like an entrance’. Instead, there is an escalator, an underpass, and a turnstile. For CityU people, the spatial memory of ‘arriving on campus’ is therefore not ‘walking up University Mall’ or ‘passing through a gate’, but ‘going up to LG1, entering the Time Tunnel, pushing through the red door’. This entrance portal provided by commercial space is the single most distinctive stroke in CityU’s place in the Hong Kong university gateway spectrum.

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# How Has ‘Shopping Mall as Entrance Portal’ Shaped Daily Life at CityU?

When the entrance portal is a mall, how does it change those who live inside? Pulling the lens from property and planning back to daily life reveals several very tangible traces.

The weather gets ‘eaten’ by the mall. Hong Kong summers are hot and humid and punctuated by heavy rain, but CityU commuters hardly have to wrestle with the elements — the main portal from MTR to classroom is entirely indoors and air-conditioned. According to the university, the route through Festival Walk takes only about five minutes^※ and most of it is inside the mall. For many students, bypassing open-air sections and sticking to the air-conditioned mall is the default choice on rainy days and in the heat — ‘better to walk a bit longer through the mall than get a drop of rain’ has become a piece of CityU commuter wisdom.

Consumption becomes folded into the commuting route. An entrance portal that is a mall means that ‘on the way home, I’ll just grab a coffee, eat, or catch a film’ is taken literally at CityU — it’s genuinely ‘on the way’. Festival Walk contains about 220 shops, an indoor ice rink called ‘Glacier’ that bills itself as the second largest in Hong Kong^※, and the MCL Festival Grand Cinema, which opened on 8 June 2016^※. Skating, watching a film, shopping, dining, grocery shopping — activities that at other universities require ‘leaving campus and taking transport’ can at CityU be ‘casually completed at the entrance’, becoming a natural extension of campus living facilities (for an inventory of facilities on and off campus, see ‹Transport and Facilities›). The flip side is that some observers have argued that a high-end shopping mall pressed right up against the university may dilute the ‘academic atmosphere’ or influence students’ consumption outlooks — such views belong to the realm of subjective campus-culture discussion and are not quantitatively adjudicated by this archive (for juxtaposed discussions, see the lore-section companion piece ‹Symbiosis with Festival Walk, the Vertical Campus, and Animal Facilities›).

The ‘red door’ becomes a shared memory anchor. In a university without a gatehouse or a formal entrance, staff and students have invented their own private ‘arrival markers’. Commuters using the mall portal treat the red exit door at the end of the Time Tunnel as the signal for ‘now I’m on campus’; residents in the Cornwall Street halls have their own set of routes and memory points for returning to the teaching blocks. These unofficial spatial anchors replace the ceremonial function of a traditional gate — CityU people do not share a gate, but they share a few unspoken understandings of ‘once you reach this spot, you’re there’.

‘Campus feel’ gets diluted into an urban feel. Traditional universities use walls, tree-lined drives, and gatehouses to demarcate a territory ‘different from the city’. CityU’s entrance portal is a shopping mall; a few steps out of class put you among shop windows and crowds, so the boundary between campus and city is especially blurred. CityU people’s spatial memories of ‘going to school’ are typically not ‘walking through a gate’ but ‘passing through a mall’. This bodily sensation constitutes the sharpest distinction between CityU and campuses that are ‘set apart by mountain and sea’ — such as CUHK at Ma Liu Shui in Sha Tin or HKUST at Clear Water Bay. CityU is not a university in an ivory tower; it is a metropolitan institution embedded in the urban fabric, with a shopping mall as its foyer.

Wayfinding becomes a mandatory course. With no main gate and the need to traverse a multi-storey mall, the first adaptation challenge for new CityU students is ‘learning the routes’: first memorise the main portal sequence of Exit C2, LG1 escalator, Time Tunnel, red door, then work out the colour-coded zoning inside the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (purple, green, blue, yellow, red zones — for wayfinding details, see ‹Transport and Facilities›). At CityU, ‘which entrance are you at’ and ‘which colour zone are you in’ are the most common spatial coordinates students use among themselves — a language forced into being precisely by the spatial pattern of ‘shopping-mall entrance portal, colour codes inside the buildings’.

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# Is CityU’s Entrance Portal a Slice of Hong Kong’s ‘Shopping-Mall Walking City’?

Viewed at the city scale, CityU’s entrance portal is not an isolated oddity, but more like a campus-sized specimen of Hong Kong’s urban tradition of organising walking through shopping malls and footbridge networks. With extremely high population density, rugged terrain, and crowded streets, Hong Kong has long developed a ‘multi-level walking’ spatial habit: lift pedestrians from street level into skywalks, podiums, and the interiors of shopping malls, allowing them to travel from MTR station to destination under air-conditioning and shelter, sometimes without ever setting foot on an open road. The layered pedestrian footbridge system in Central is the best-known expression of this logic; MTR-topped shopping centres connecting to surrounding buildings are its ubiquitous variant across the districts.

Festival Walk is precisely this logic applied in Kowloon Tong: built atop Kowloon Tong MTR Station on the former bus terminus site, it stitches together the railway, retail, offices, and the neighbouring university into a continuous indoor walking system. CityU is merely the university plugged into the end of that system — staff and students ‘going to school by passing through the mall’ essentially share the same spatial habit as a Kowloon Tong office worker ‘going to work by passing through the mall’. Once you understand this, you won’t see CityU’s lack of a gate as an oversight or a makeshift solution: it is an urban university conforming to the logic of Hong Kong’s ‘shopping-mall walking city’. Instead of sealing itself behind walls, CityU has handed its foyer over to the pedestrian network that already belongs to the city.

This also means the fate of CityU’s entrance portal has never been entirely in CityU’s own hands. The mall’s ownership has changed several times, floor plans are reconfigured, the escalator sits next to a shop, the passage opens and closes at certain hours — a significant portion of the variables governing daily entry and exit lie with the mall owner and the MTR. What CityU can independently decide is the stretch of passage on its own property and the card-activated turnstile; the rest of the portal is always a space shared with and shifting with the city. That is the deepest meaning of ‘shopping mall as entrance portal’: CityU has entrusted its most face-like space to the city. (This section consists of observational analysis of spatial pattern and makes no quantitative claims.)

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# In Sum: An Entrance Portal That ‘Doesn’t Belong to Itself’

CityU’s entrance portal brings together the several threads of this article: it has no gate because a compact urban campus has no boundary that needs a gate; it uses a shopping mall as its foyer because the former bus-terminus, former squatter-village plot beneath it was planned in 1993 as a shopping centre built next to the campus, targeting university traffic as a core audience; the link bridge, while no explicit land-sale clause can be confirmed, has ample design evidence showing it was part of the original plan; its checkpoint is not at a gate but at passage turnstiles that have been retreating inward; and all of this has shaped CityU people’s distinctive daily rhythm of ‘going to school through a mall, consuming along the way, and orienting by colour codes’.

In one sentence, the place that most resembles a ‘gate’ at CityU does not, for a large stretch, belong to CityU itself — this threshold relayed through the spaces of the MTR, the mall, and the university is the key to understanding CityU’s spatial character. For the link bridge’s renovation, ownership transactions, and CityU’s latest step of purchasing the Festival Walk office tower in 2026, see ‹Transport and Facilities›; for the lore-side account of university-mall symbiosis and the vertical campus, see ‹Symbiosis with Festival Walk, the Vertical Campus, and Animal Facilities›.

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