I love Hong Kong and to me, it has always felt like a place that accidentally time-traveled ahead of the rest of us. While other cities were still arguing about high-rise or discovering what the 15-Minute City means, Hong Kong was already living in a world of hyper-dense skyscrapers, instantaneous public transport, and escalators long enough to trigger philosophical reflection. It is, in so many ways, the city of the future—sleek, vertical, efficient, buzzing with energy—and yet, it remains a gloriously human place, full of quirks, frustrations, and contradictions that make it impossible not to love.

Part of Hong Kong’s future-ness lies in the way it stacks life upward. Where most cities politely spread out across the land, Hong Kong thought: “What if we just built a hundred stories up and called it a day?” The result is a skyline that looks like someone spilled a box of silver dominoes across the mountains, except the dominoes are full of people drinking milk tea and checking the MTR arrival times. This verticality feels sci-fi, but also surprisingly cosy—like living in a skyscraper village with a dim sum shop every twenty meters.

And speaking of the MTR: if the future ever needs a transit system that actually works, it should just call Hong Kong and ask to borrow the blueprints. The trains glide in on time—as in, really on time—not “urban transit authority on time, please excuse delays, we are investigating.” They are clean, fast, air-conditioned, and politely beep at you like an apologetic robot if you stand too close to the doors. You can cross the whole city without ever touching a steering wheel, which feels like a futuristic miracle until you realize Hong Kong has been doing it since bell-bottoms were fashionable the first time.

Then there is nature—Hong Kong’s secret superpower. For a place commonly described as a “concrete jungle,” it is astonishingly green. Mountains, beaches, forests, islands—they’re all right there, as if the city decided it was going to be hyper-urban and hyper-wild simultaneously, just to show off. In the future, when people dream of cities that offer both high-density living and direct access to hiking trails, Hong Kong will probably smirk and say, “Sweetie, we’ve had that since the ’70s.”

But loving Hong Kong also means accepting that the city sometimes shoots itself in the foot while sprinting toward tomorrow.

Affordability, for instance, is Hong Kong’s great cosmic joke—though no one laughs. Housing prices have long since detached from reality and now orbit the city like a rogue satellite. Young people face an Olympic-level challenge just to rent a flat that isn’t shaped like a shoebox. Families squeeze into spaces that architects elsewhere would call “experimental tiny-home prototypes.” Even the future doesn’t seem big enough to hold the dreams of Hongkongers when the square footage is so… aspirational.

And then there’s the question of status—once the undisputed queen of Asian finance, Hong Kong now finds itself sharing the stage with Singapore, a city so clean, and orderly it sometimes feels like it was designed by a Swiss watchmaker who fell in love with air-conditioning. Meanwhile, other Southeast Asian cities—Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Jakarta—are rising with youthful swagger, competitive markets, and the irresistible charm of places that still believe the future belongs to them. Hong Kong hasn’t lost its edge, but it is uncomfortably aware that the world is getting crowded with contenders who run fast and don’t mind sweating.

The city’s politics and governance have also left bruises—tensions, transitions, a shifting sense of place. The future is supposed to be stable and visionary, but Hong Kong’s path sometimes feels like a high-speed ferry in rough water: powerful, determined, but occasionally queasy. The city continues to reinvent itself—because reinvention is in its DNA—but even reinvention requires confidence, clarity, and a sense of possibility, all of which have been tested in recent years.

Yet despite all this—despite the cost of living, the talent competition, the geopolitical headwinds—Hong Kong endures with a kind of stubborn brilliance. It keeps going. It keeps adapting. It keeps being Hong Kong.

What makes the city extraordinary—and undeniably future-shaped—is not perfection but resilience. It is the spirit of a place that can rebuild itself a dozen times and still find room for humour, creativity, neon, dumplings, and an inexplicably efficient airport express train. Hong Kong feels alive, unpredictable, occasionally exasperating, and always compelling.

The future may be challenging, chaotic, and contested. But if cities must learn to be dense, diverse, efficient, green, and endlessly adaptable, then Hong Kong—with all its brilliance and all its flaws—is already living in that world. It stands as a reminder that the cities of tomorrow will be complicated and layered and full of contradictions—exactly like Hong Kong has been all along.