Over the past decade, Hong Kong has been searching for suitable sites to meet its strong housing demand. Due to the compact cityscape of the city, most of the very limited readily available lands are inevitably close to various significant noise sources such as highly trafficked roads, busy rail lines and existing industrial areas. This brings great challenges to provide an acceptable noise environment for the future residents. Hence, the HKSAR Government not only seizes every opportunity to require the housing developers to conduct noise impact assessments for housing developments under planning so as to ensure all the necessary and practicable measures to be incorporated in the developments for mitigating noise impacts but also endeavors to explore new noise mitigation measures or designs suitable for application in Hong Kong. In the past, self-protecting building designs like high podium and single aspect building have been developed and considered. However, their applications are subject to constraints and cannot be widely adopted. In recent years, special designs of building envelope, which are capable of effectively reducing noise entering into the residential units and allowing sufficient natural ventilation at the same time, have been delved and put in use in newly developed housing developments. They are in the form of acoustic window with glazing at suitable locations on two layers for screening and acoustic balcony with a combination of special features such as noise screen above solid front parapet, full height side walls and absorptive lining. This paper outlines these special noise mitigation designs of acoustic windows and acoustic balconies and shares the latest development of their application in Hong Kong.
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