Coexisting with Festival Walk, the Vertical Campus, and the Animal Facilities

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK / 城大) integrated information database · Campus Lore module

Reading note (Lore section): The core facts in this article (Festival Walk's opening year, its developer, the pedestrian link to CityU, CityU's 2025 purchase of office floors, and the history of the veterinary facilities) are supported by official or reliable news sources and are rated "multiply corroborated." Characterisations such as "most mall-like" or "ivory-tower atmosphere" are subjective impressions at the level of campus culture; this archive marks them as informal / observational commentary and does not treat them as quantified claims.

This piece focuses on CityU's spatial entanglements and animal facilities; for lore on the university crest, motto, and landmark buildings, see the companion piece 《校徽存廢爭議、校訓源流與標誌建築》.

Walk out of a classroom, and a few steps later you can be inside a luxury shopping mall — for CityU students, this is the most concrete spatial memory of "going to class." The CityU main campus at Kowloon Tong sits directly against Festival Walk, connected by a pedestrian passage, and has long been informally nicknamed the "most mall-like" university campus in Hong Kong. This 20-plus-year "campus-mall coexistence" reached a substantive turning point at the end of 2025: CityU is no longer just the "neighbour next door" — it has bought a floor of offices inside the mall. This article starts from there, and extends to the vertical-campus logic CityU developed under land pressure, and to two "animal enclaves" unique to this urban university.

# A university that "grew up beside a mall"

Among Hong Kong's universities, CityU has a fairly distinctive geographic feature: its Kowloon Tong main campus is directly adjacent to Festival Walk, linked by a pedestrian footbridge/passage. According to CityU's campus information page^※, it takes about 5 minutes on foot from Kowloon Tong MTR station through Festival Walk to reach the CityU campus — the MTR station, the mall, and the university are physically almost seamlessly connected.

Most university campuses are relatively enclosed, self-contained "ivory towers"; CityU's main campus, by contrast, shares the same site fabric with a top-tier shopping mall — daily foot traffic, shopping, dates, studying, cinema-going, and ice skating can all happen "at the campus gate." This kind of "campus-mall coexistence" is not common among Hong Kong's universities.

# Festival Walk's origins: an independent commercial landmark

According to Wikipedia^※, Festival Walk was jointly developed by Swire Properties and CITIC Pacific, and was built between 1993 and 1998^※ (construction began in 1994, opening in November 1998). At opening it was the largest mall in Hong Kong by floor area, with one of Asia's largest ice rinks and a multiplex cinema. Festival Walk connects to Kowloon Tong MTR station, an interchange between the East Rail Line and the Kwun Tong Line — so CityU students step not only "straight into a mall," but "straight into a transport hub."

A clarification of record: historically, Festival Walk was a commercial property developed by Swire and CITIC Pacific and has changed hands several times since; it was not a CityU asset. The relationship between CityU and Festival Walk was, for a long time, one of "geographic adjacency plus pedestrian link," not "owner and property" — this held true until 2025. Referring to Festival Walk broadly as "CityU's mall" was, historically, inaccurate.

# 2025: CityU buys office floors in Festival Walk

The campus-mall relationship saw a notable turn at the end of 2025. According to a South China Morning Post report^※:

According to statements CityU gave to the South China Morning Post^※, the purchase was made to address "a shortage of campus space and rising demand for research facilities, particularly wet labs." Leasing off-campus wet-lab space involves high fit-out and reinstatement costs and uncertainty around lease renewal, so purchasing was said to be more economical; combined with the property's adjacency to campus, it was described as "a rare and irreplaceable opportunity." Administrative offices are to move in in phases once the legal process is complete. This means the relationship between CityU and Festival Walk has moved from simple "adjacent coexistence" toward "owning part of the floor space" — the boundary between campus and mall has blurred further, in keeping with CityU's longstanding spatial strategies of vertical development and off-site housing.

# A campus forced to "grow upward": the vertical campus

CityU's main campus, on Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong, covers only about 15.6 hectares. Land pressure pushed CityU to develop a distinctive spatial strategy — the vertical campus: stacking teaching, research, exhibition, and administrative functions upward through the building rather than spreading them outward. The clearest example is the Lau Ming Wai Academic Building (AC3, covered in the companion piece), which stacks academic functions vertically, with exhibition facilities placed on the top floor. This spatial logic also partly explains some of the more distant causes behind campus incidents at CityU — the addition of rooftop greening on the gymnasium at the time was, to some extent, a response to the scarcity of ground-level space, and is indirectly linked to the 2016 rooftop collapse incident (see the companion piece "Major Campus Incident Records" in Module 15, "Campus Cats and Animal Lore"). Space pressure is one key to understanding many of CityU's campus decisions.

An urban campus combines convenience with compactness: meals, shopping, cinema, and the MTR can all be "handled downstairs," which for many students is part of the appeal; but some also feel that a campus pressed close against a mall, with little open green space, has less of the quiet stillness of a traditional university — this is an observational view that varies by person, and this archive does not render a quantified verdict on it. This "urban, pragmatic, vertical" spatial character has also driven CityU to keep "finding space," from the Ma On Shan residence village to the 2025 purchase of Festival Walk office floors — spatial expansion runs as a persistent undercurrent through its longer-term narrative.

# The Li Shu Kee Student Residence Village: a sample of Modular Integrated Construction (MiC) housing

With CityU's main campus land tight and hall places long in shortage, the Li Shu Kee Student Residence Village in Pak Shek, Ma On Shan represents a large-scale expansion of student housing outside the main campus. According to the Henderson Land Development news centre (6 December 2024)^※, the residence village held its opening and naming ceremony on 6 December 2024^※, located at Pak Shek, Ma On Shan^※, providing over 2,000 hall places. The whole complex uses Modular Integrated Construction (MiC), assembled from over 1,300 modules, with rooms, corridors, bathrooms, and plant rooms built from prefabricated units; according to a HK01 report^※, the project is a sample of MiC-built student housing in the upscale Ma On Shan residential area, and was described by relevant officials as one reference case for similar projects. The rooftop is fitted with 110 solar panels and a smart building management system.

The residence village is named after the late Henderson Land founder Dr. Lee Shau Kee, in recognition of his long-standing support for CityU since 2006 (including 2018 donations via the "Lee Shau Kee Foundation" that funded professorial chairs and scholarships; naming after a donor is a straightforward, sourced fact, recorded as such). This residence village marks a shift in CityU's housing pattern from "concentrated on the main campus" to "dispersed across districts," and has also produced a distinctive group of "commuting resident students," who travel between the main campus and the residence village.

# CityU's "animal campus": the origins of the veterinary animal facilities

CityU is the only institution in Hong Kong offering an undergraduate veterinary programme^※, which has given rise to two "animal campus" facilities unique among Hong Kong universities — the CityU Veterinary Medical Centre in Sham Shui Po, and the veterinary teaching farm in Lam Tsuen. Both are landmark additions to CityU's campus culture over roughly the past decade.

# CityU Veterinary Medical Centre (CityU VMC)

The CityU Veterinary Medical Centre traces its origins to a long-established private clinic. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, its history runs as follows: it originated from the Tai Po Road Pet Clinic, founded in 1984^※ (founded the same year as CityU itself, purely a coincidence); its MRI centre opened in 2004^※, described in the source as "the first veterinary medical centre to offer MRI services specifically for pets"; it opened an approximately 18,000-sq-ft facility on Free Road, Ho Man Tin, in July 2008^※; it came under full ownership of City University of Hong Kong on 1 September 2016^※ and was integrated into the veterinary teaching system; and it moved to its current site in 2019, renamed the "CityU Animal Medical Centre"^※.

According to a CityU official news release^※, the new centre held its opening ceremony on 27 March 2019 and formally began operating on 3 April^※, located on Lai Chi Kok Road in Sham Shui Po, covering about 33,000 sq ft across three floors. Facilities include Hong Kong's first animal intensive care unit (ICU), 22 consultation rooms, 9 operating theatres, a cardiology centre, and 24-hour emergency service; imaging equipment includes a 64-slice CT scanner, a 1.5-tesla MRI, digital X-ray, and ultrasound, covering eight specialties: surgery, anaesthesiology, neurology, dermatology, cardiology, ophthalmology, internal medicine, and emergency/critical care.

The centre is described by official sources and secondary accounts as one of "the largest animal medical teaching hospitals, and public-health and medical institutions, in Asia," and it also serves as a clinical teaching site for veterinary undergraduates, who train on live cases — extending CityU's "campus," in physical terms, into a functioning animal hospital. At the opening, the then-president described the years spent developing the veterinary programme as "a decade of sharpening one sword." For the fuller history and campus lore surrounding the animal hospital, campus cats, and the veterinary school, see the companion piece "Module 15: CityU Campus Cats and Animal Lore."

# The Lam Tsuen veterinary teaching farm: "the cows have come home"

Beyond the urban animal hospital, CityU also operates a teaching farm in the New Territories. According to a CityU official news release^※, CityU held a groundbreaking ceremony on 19 November 2020^※ for a veterinary teaching farm in Lam Tsuen, Tai Po. The farm is planned to include internationally standard facilities and to support teaching and research on large animals, including dairy cattle, guided by the "One Health" concept focused on public health, food safety, and animal welfare.

According to the release, the farm was first conceived by a then-president in 2008, received Town Planning Board approval for educational use in May 2020, and involves cooperation on veterinary education with Cornell University in the United States (a memorandum of understanding was signed in December 2009). The release quotes the then-president's remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony: "CityU is committed to promoting physical and mental well-being — the cows have now come home," and states that the farm was expected to produce "CityU milk and ice cream" the following year.

# Summary

The lore of CityU's spaces and animal facilities covered in this article can be grouped into three threads:

1. Coexistence with Festival Walk — CityU's Kowloon Tong main campus sits directly against Festival Walk, linked by a pedestrian passage; historically this was "geographic adjacency," not "owner and property." In December 2025, CityU spent HK$1.96 billion to buy a floor of offices inside Festival Walk, blurring the campus-mall boundary further.
2. Vertical campus and housing expansion — land pressure gave rise to a "stack upward" spatial logic; the Li Shu Kee Student Residence Village (Ma On Shan, built with Modular Integrated Construction) is the latest extension of that logic into the suburbs.
3. The animal campus — the Sham Shui Po animal medical centre and the Lam Tsuen teaching farm are two facilities unique to CityU, arising from its veterinary-education strategy, and extend CityU's "campus" across four locations.

For lore on the university crest, motto, and landmark buildings, see the companion piece 《校徽存廢爭議、校訓源流與標誌建築》.