A politically less contested and financially more calculable urban future: Density techniques and heightened land commodification in Taiwan

Abstract

This article examines and makes explicit the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, their depoliticization effects, and heightened land commodification in Taiwan's acceleration to a real estate–oriented economy. TDR (transfer of development rights) and density bonusing are two almost omnipresent practices in urban land development in Taiwan. We ask how their technocratic approach—using predetermined formulas to bracket density use while almost entirely foreclosing community negotiation—has played a formative role in accelerating land commodification. Using mixed research methods, the case study of Central North in New Taipei City helps lay bare how formulaic density rules enable planners to embed their epistemic assumptions about what constitutes a good city within intensified property development. Mimicking the calculative practices performed by the real estate sector, we use residual valuation methods to estimate the maximum price-lifting effects of 18 real estate development projects. We show that formulaic rules allow density to enter cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets as a profit booster in advance of actual granting of extra density, emboldening aggressive land brokering, buying, and selling, which churn up land prices. We argue that the technical depoliticization generated by TDR and density bonusing has become the most effective catalyst in creating a politically less contested and financially more calculable urban world in which capital's acquisitive appetite for land's monetary value is intensified. We conclude by discussing the implications for how to move density from a domain of technical rules and real estate finance to a politics of land.

Keywords

TDR density bonusing technical depoliticization land development land commodification

Introduction

In the past two decades, density fever has been a salient feature in planning and land development in Taiwan. An investigative report released by the Control Yuan, the highest supervisory agency of the Taiwanese central government, publicly recognized that planning authorities at all governmental levels grant real estate developers significantly more building density beyond zoning limits (Control Yuan, 2012). More than 20 regulatory measures,¹ when used in various combinations, can greatly intensify urban property development, essentially rendering FAR (floor area ratio) a development control of little relevance. Density fever in Taiwan, of course, reflects the widespread popularity of density-based tools that planners around the world use to mobilize land development to extract private profits and public benefits, often with the hope that the former will pay for the latter (Christophers, 2014; Liong et al., 2020; Pérez, 2020; Robinson and Attuyer, 2021; Shih et al., 2018; Wolf-Powers, 2012).

The transformation of the Central North area (hereinafter Central North) in Xindian District in New Taipei City epitomizes the spatialized landscape and real estate market that density tools have helped materialize. Prior to 2013, Central North consisted of 40 hectares of urban farmlands in the highly urbanized Xindian District. When the farmland was upzoned to a residential area, the land-use control ordinance set the legally buildable FAR at 240% and the minimum lot area at three sizes: 100, 300, and 500 square meters (m²). At the time of writing, the actual FARs in Central North ranged from 271% to 384% and site areas from 1240 to 9981 m², far greater than the limits set in zoning regulations. It is four density bonusing measures—Large-Site Development (daguimo kaifa), Green Building (lujianzhu), Smart Building (zhihuijianzhu), and Social Housing (shehui zhuzhai)—as well as TDR (transfer of development rights), that form the regulatory premises on which developers operate. Although local programs vary, the core workings of density-based tools are globally similar—making land more flexible for the extraction of its monetary value. Density bonusing intensifies property development, often with the hope of gaining privately funded public benefits in return. TDR does this in part by deterritorializing the air rights above a land parcel by making them tradable across space. The material landscape of high-rise, large-scale real estate development is also a speculative and unaffordable land and housing market. Luxury residential buildings easily push housing prices in Central North to among the highest in the city.

As two almost omnipresent practices in Taiwan's land development practices, TDR and density bonusing have expanded the territory of the real estate market into the sky since the 1990s, enabling land and housing to become more easily ensnared in the fast churning up of real estate capital. In the northern metropolitan region, which consists of Taipei City and New Taipei City, land prices increased 14.28% and 26.52%, respectively, from 2012 to 2020.² In 2002, in both cities, the housing price to household income ratio was slightly above six; in 2020, it went up to 14.85 for the former and 11.86 for the latter.³

Building on Central North as a case study, we examine the technocratic approach to TDR and density bonusing and ask how bracketing density use within planners’ technical expertise and professional judgment has played a formative role in land commodification and speculative urbanism. Both TDR and density bonusing use predetermined formula-based rules to dictate the conditions for and quantity of density granting. Relatedly, technical rules almost entirely foreclose community negotiation as a mechanism to shape the process, structure, and ends of density use. This bracketing of density tools from being appropriated by the larger urban public for alternative imagination and political contestation of land use differs significantly from the emerging scholarship and community movements that see social negotiation and democratic participation as key to re-embedding land value capture into the practice of more socially just and equitable development (Céspedes et al., 2019; Helbrecht and Weber-Newth, 2018; Shih and Shieh, 2020; Wolf-Powers, 2012).

How density techniques dovetail politically with the increasingly entrepreneurial state's deepening conceptualization and treatment of land as “a reservoir of money” (Haila, 1991: 359) requires interrogation. On the one hand, Asia has undergone what Gavin Shatkin calls an urban “real estate turn” in which the state takes part in monetizing, valorizing, and extracting land values through for-profit real estate megaprojects (2017). Since the late 1980s, Taiwan has continued to roll out neoliberal policies that underpin the ascent of real estate capital and land development. TDR and density bonusing are two popular recent devices, joining earlier marketization strategies such as privatization of public land, deregulation of financial capital investments, and public–private partnerships (Chen H-Y, 2020; Chen Y-L, 2020; Hsu and Hsu, 2013; Shih et al., 2018; Yang and Chang, 2018). On the other hand, if, as Timothy Mitchell argues, “the politics of national development and economic growth [is] a politics of techno-science” (2007: 15), then examining the political work of a technocratic approach to density is key to prying open how Taiwan's real estate-oriented urban economy accelerates.

Recent scholarship on capitalist land development has shed important light on the performative aspect of market devices. Whether it is Tax Increment Financing in the US, viability appraisal models of affordable housing in England, or density-based tools elsewhere, the technical design of the device actively constructs a financialized urban economy that, in turn, reinforces its use (Chen H-Y, 2020; Christophers, 2014; Liong et al., 2020; Sclar, 2020; Shih and Chang, 2016; Weber, 2021; Yang and Chang, 2018). It is widely recognized that market devices enable calculative practices under which the normalization of real estate development profit has “come to be inscribed into the fabric of the urban world” (Christophers, 2014: 87). Or, as Rachel Weber argues, these devices have helped “embed financialized modes of futurity into governance” (2021: 505). In almost all these works, however, density has a rather static ontology. It is often assumed away as a thing (such as building floor area) or a form of land rent (e.g. Haila (2016) calls it density rent) that can be doled out to mobilize intensified property development.

This article advances the growing body of global scholarship on land commodification and technical market devices by approaching density as what Federico Pérez calls an urban epistemology (2020). In his discussion of Colombian planners’ use of edificabilidad (or buildability) in Bogotá, Pérez argues that “[f]ar from a stable, descriptive category, density is a profoundly generative practice” that can be enacted differently by different actors, and how planners use density reflects their epistemic assumptions about “people, things and their mutual entailments” (ibid.: 618, 617). This is an important insight for our work that tackles the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, political depoliticization, and land commodification. As detailed in the subsequent section, the rewarding of select types of land development through density-based tools is deeply entangled with planners’ epistemic assumptions and value perceptions of what a good city should look like and consist of. When granting large-site development, the most generous density bonus in Central North, planners in fact act in a particular way that rewards one aggressive form of urban development more than other, and perhaps more just, land uses, such as social housing. Similarly, making air rights fungible by way of TDR is equally intertwined with Taiwanese planners’ acting to resolve their own legitimacy crisis in the face of the reserved land issue, due to the unduly top-down practice of restrictive zoning.

As Pérez's work also clearly shows, when technocratic treatment of density obscures and reduces urban politics, what gets propped up is “the logic of the market at the expense of more encompassing political projects and planning rationalities” even for laudable goals such as inclusionary housing (2020: 617). In Japan, André Sorensen et al. offer a similar observation when they argue that obscure technical formulas of building density create “the huge political advantage of being completely invisible to the average citizen,” allowing the state to create conducive conditions for intensified property development (2010: 556). We center today's deeper monetary treatment of land on how density techniques work to enable planners to embed their epistemic values into intensified urban development, which has been driven by, and also is driving, Taiwan's neoliberal restructuring to a real estate–oriented economy. The scholarship on land value capture largely sees the negotiation over conditions for density granting as a way for state actors, who are hard pressed by urban austerity's self-financing tenet even for social welfare programs, to recover the much-needed public benefits from the private sector benefited by an increase in land value (Robinson and Attuyer, 2021; Shih and Shieh, 2020). Our work brings further important nuances to the discussion by making explicit the effect on land commodification when density techniques give a false impression of objectivity while, in fact, social negotiation and political contestation are largely removed by density formulas (also see Weber's discussion, 2021). Central North is a useful case study because it lays bare differentiated rules of density, how those rules perform planners’ epistemic values through real estate development, and the outcome of a highly speculative and unaffordable land and housing market.

It is at the juncture of Taiwan's economic restructuring to a real estate turn and its technocratic approach to the density that we interrogate how TDR and density bonusing produce effects of technical depoliticization that sanitize socioeconomically messy urban conditions into discrete and calculable factors that can be worked through in a development project's cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets. Building on the case study of Central North, we examine the market dynamics, material landscapes, and price effects as a result of density techniques. We argue that the technical depoliticization generated by TDR and density bonusing has become the most effective catalyst in creating a politically less contested and financially more calculable urban world in which capital's acquisitive appetite for land's monetary value is intensified.

Using mixed methods of qualitative fieldwork research and quantitative development finance analysis, we examine how the techniques of TDR and density bonusing embolden real estate developers’ calculative practices and land hunts in Central North, driving up land purchase prices. Between 2018 and 2019, in addition to archival research and site visits, we carried out in-depth, open-ended interviews with 15 government planners, land brokers, land appraisers, property developers, and finance professionals in charge of land and construction loans. As research trips were not possible because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, nine additional interviews were conducted via phone and Zoom. During the interviews, we learned that property developers either hired or had in-house “density consultants” (rongji zixun) who specialized in the financial analysis of density use. Eight of our interviewees had such a background, enabling us to develop a grounded understanding of density techniques’ effects on development finance and land markets. In addition, to show the kind of speculative urban world that density techniques have materialized in Central North, we mimic the standard development finance analysis performed by real estate professionals in Taiwan—the residual land valuation methods—to estimate density's lifting effect on land purchase prices. The residual model is also the basis of the financial viability test for land value capture in England (McAllister, 2017). The penultimate section details estimation methods, results, and data sources. Our analysis and estimates suggest that TDR and density bonusing have a significant lifting effect on land prices. Formulaic rules allow property developers to impute density gain as an increase in sale revenue in advance of the actual granting; this density boost then produces a sanguine profit projection, emboldening land brokers to tackle tasks of land assembly by approaching landowners with higher purchase prices. Meanwhile, the lack of community participation enables property developers to focus negotiation efforts on matters of land sale transactions. Even after accounting for a net profit of 20% of a project's total sale, our estimates show that all projects but one are able to increase the land purchase price, a booster effect ranging from 671 to 5272 USD/m². The new Central North—intensified, large-scale, and unaffordable—is the resulting urban economy, and urban struggle, into which density techniques have locked us.

Density techniques: sanitizing the politics of land into calculable development finance

In Taiwan, both TDR and density bonusing treat density use largely as a technical matter within the domains of planners’ professional expertise and regulatory power. All density rules involve FAR-based formulas that predetermine and dictate how much extra density can be granted and for what purpose. Although a higher-density development may be required to pass an additional environmental impact review by the municipal urban design committee, neither the planning authority nor the developer is legally required to hold public hearings to inform residents of the project's intensified development and the possible impacts on the community. Only recently has the Taipei city government begun to register the additionally granted floor area on a building's use permit. To date, publicly accessible information on density granting is highly limited and almost never available prior to the fact of real estate development. In other words, scant public participation characterizes intensified real estate development.

This technocratic approach to density has taken place as Taiwan has accelerated its orientation toward what Gavin Shatkin calls Asia's real estate turn, in which the state takes the lead in churning up for-profit land development (2017; also see Smart and Lee, 2003; Sorensen et al., 2010). Since the late 1980s, the state has played an increasingly active role in accelerating capital investments in the urban built environment. This can be seen in the fast rollout of a series of neoliberal policies, such as the privatization of public land, removal of regulatory barriers to financial capital's cross-investment in real estate markets, large-scale rural land readjustment projects, and urban renewal. Meanwhile, low property tax rates continue to keep land-holding costs down (Chen H-Y, 2020; Chen Y-L, 2020; Hua, 2000; Hsu and Hsu, 2013).

Accelerated land development and commodification, however, encounters heterogeneous modes of spatial production, different value perceptions of land, and diverse lived experiences. Manish Chalana and Jeffrey Hou use “messy urbanism” not as a normative aesthetics but as a provocation to describe the social practice and negotiability of citizenship, rights, and use of urban spaces that make porous many taken-for-granted binaries—such as formal and informal, legal and illegal, permanent, and temporary (2016). As discussed in detail later, messy urban conditions abound in Taiwan (Chien, 2019; Shih and Chang, 2016). As sites of potential political contestation, messy urban conditions may blunt capital's creative destruction by slowing down its circuits in the urban built environment.

Taiwan's TDR and density bonusing are institutionally averse to social negotiation. When devising density rules, a government official told us the aim is to make density granting criteria as quantifiable and predictable as possible so that density formulas “reduce variations in human interpretations and demands in the density review process at the planning committee” (Interview, city government official, April 2021). But clearly, formulaic rules do not remove human influence. Rather, they simply make the influences and their sources—whether they are planners’ epistemic values or real estate capital's profit interest—less detectable to the public. By closing off an institutional space for open debate and public deliberation, fixed formulas and set criteria become formative in real estate developers’ calculative practices and transaction negotiations in land development. Using Michael Callon's language, negotiations are “cold” when “actors are identified, interests are stabilized, preferences can be expressed, responsibilities are acknowledged and accepted” so that “calculated decisions can be taken” (1998: 261; also Barry, 2002). Chang-I Hua bluntly pointed out that “the creation and transfer of development rights based on FAR have, given the high land prices, become the most serious game in town” (2000: 60). Karl Polanyi once likened “separating land from man [sic]…to satisfy the requirements of the real-estate market” to a man “being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land” (2001 [1944], p. 187). By sidelining and foreclosing questions capable of prying open the politics of land—such as what kind of land development is worthy of density rewards, who decides, at whose cost, and to what end—Taiwan's density techniques have a tendency to remove the social life of land to satisfy the economic profit of real estate development.

Timothy Mitchell's critique of technical expertise in general and of de Soto's land titling, in particular, provides further insights into the depoliticizing effects generated by Taiwan's density rules. Although land titling to capitalize informal shelters is empirically different from density granting to spur real estate markets, the essence of using technical devices to construct markets and as a popular solution to “the problem of economic development in the global south” is the same (Mitchell, 2007: 247). In The Mystery of Capital, de Soto argues that self-built shelters in informal settlements are dead capital because they are not fungible (2000). The key to turning trapped value in shelters into live capital, the argument continues, is that the titling technique standardizes physical and locational variations (or messiness) into property records that can be traded from a distance. Mitchell points out, however, that the divide between dead and live capital by way of fungibility is artificial and empirically and conceptually flawed (2007). Villagers in Egypt, for example, constantly move resources into and out of a variety of assets, such as livestock, business ventures, and credits, depending on changing household needs and cash flow conditions. What titling as a social and governing technology does, Mitchell argues, is to “reorganize how people live, the political claims they can make, and the assets they can control” (2007: 248). This depoliticized outcome has a real financial and material impact on the poor. When a home property becomes a collateral asset, opportunities are created for “speculation, for the concentrating of wealth, and for the accumulation of rents,” which drive land costs higher and make housing more expensive. This leads to “an intertemporal transfer of wealth” through which people who save now with the hope of buying or building a house in the future will shoulder “the premium of paying the income of speculators and rentiers” (Mitchell, 2007: 262). Density techniques have similar depoliticization and price effects.

Deflecting political contestation of planning into real estate market expansion: transfer of development rights

TDR is a technique of fungible air rights (Sclar, 2020). In Taiwan, the institutionalization of TDR took place in the late 1990s when the reserved land (baoliudi) issue became too great a political challenge for planning authorities to ignore (Shih and Chang, 2016). The reserved land issue refers to planners’ use of zoning power to designate private lands as public facilities and consequently strip away the land's development potential; meanwhile, local governments have yet to compensate affected landowners due to budgetary constraints. Decades after the initial eruption of social protests against the reserved land issue in the 1980s, thousands of hectares of reserved land still exist in cities today. Although some reserved lands have remained idle, most of them have been used by the public as roads or parks even though compensation has yet to take place. The Legislative Yuan, the legislative branch of the central government, once called the reserve land issue so messy that it is intricately complex and nearly impossible to resolve (1988).

In 1997, the Ministry of Interior devised a TDR measure to incentivize property developers to buy reserved lands directly from affected landowners and donate these parcels to the local government in exchange for extra density. A TDR formula computes the amount of density reward (in floor area) based solely on the land prices and land areas of the sending (i.e. reserved land) and receiving (i.e. new development) sites.⁴ In designing the TDR formula, the Ministry of the Interior declared that free-market trading of development rights “will be of tremendous help for smoothly moving urban redevelopment forward” (1997: 2). The TDR measure immediately jolted intensive buying, brokering, and selling of reserved land, as property developers are eager to expand building volume and saleable units (Shih et al., 2018). TDR's marketization formula now allows political expediency and land deals to appropriate density rent while keeping planning power intact.

Alchemizing planners’ epistemic values into land's monetary value: density bonusing

In Taiwan, what is worthy of density bonuses is determined by planners’ urban epistemics and professional judgment. In the early 1980s, planners in Taipei City wanted to make streets more “public” and began to reward density to development projects with design features of open spaces such as art exhibitions and plazas. This initial exception to FAR control quickly extended to include privately built parking lots for public use. As planners at all governmental levels continue to discover what is good for the city's future and what is lacking in the present, the purview of density bonusing also grows. As the real estate–oriented economy has tightened its grip on urban development, the practice of density bonusing has grown from a supposed exception to a norm. As a result, there is now a large and growing assortment of national laws, local regulations, and area-specific land-use ordinances that ensure inexhaustible sources of extra density for almost any real estate development project.

In 1998, the central government legislated the Urban Renewal Act to accelerate the demolition and rebuilding of old neighborhoods in the city. These physically worn-down neighborhoods, however, often house socially tight-knit communities with economically vibrant activities. “Messy urbanism” is often a way of life. For example, ordinary families facing rising housing prices often navigate tight living spaces by enclosing balconies, adding rooftop makeshift rooms, and extending ground-floor structures to encroach on public space in the alley. These add-on spaces are officially illegal, but they have important use and economic values, functioning as private living spaces, rental units, or business floors. These old neighborhoods with many opportunities for informal arrangements are also where the right to the city becomes a reality for low-income people and small businesses. To make the situation messier, local authorities rarely initiate outright demolition out of concern about public backlashes, effecting a social understanding that housing rights are a negotiated outcome of sociopolitical contestation.

To channel capital into these neighborhoods, the Urban Renewal Act grants redevelopment projects density bonuses in total up to 50% of the baseline FAR if certain conditions are met. In an interview, a government planner ran a partial list of these conditions to give us a sense of the widespread applicability and use of density bonusing. The conditions mentioned included speedy development, site design, greenification before construction, comprehensive development, pedestrian walkways, city tree protection, and the provision of public facilities of all kinds.

Challenged by little public questioning and community negotiation, density formulas have become a most effective catalytic agent through which planners alchemize their epistemic values into real estate capital's extracting and valorizing of land's monetary value. The following interview excerpt is illustrative of the permeation between planners’ urban epistemologies of density and their facilitative role in urban real estate development. When we asked a government official on what basis planners grant density bonuses, he said “these [rules], of course, are many and different (wuhua bamen). This is to top the number to make urban renewal easier” (Interview, April 2021). “Top the number” refers to adding density through multiple regulatory channels so that even development sites that face specific physical constraints can still reach the maximum amount of density bonuses. But when we pointed out that, given the fact that Central North's upzoning from farmland to residential use is already significant value creation, it does not seem justifiable to reward additional profit incentives for large-scale development in this completely new development zone, he resorted to planners’ professional judgment, saying, “we all wish for large-site development, there is no question about that … Once large street blocks are formed, it is good for the overall urban landscape and environment” (ibid).

At this juncture, it becomes difficult to distinguish actualizing urban renewal from actualizing an epistemic assumption when a select type of land development is density rewarded. This difficulty is created by the technical treatment of density. And we argue that this is exactly the political work that formulaic density rules do—rendering the formative role of density techniques in land commodification difficult to detect. When planners normalize density bonusing—by decontextualizing the messy urban conditions, basing the rationale of supposedly exceptional granting on planners’ technical expertise, limiting spaces for community negotiation and participation, and sanitizing possible political contestation of land and planning—Taiwan's density fever gives the real estate market the uppermost hand in using density as found money⁵ to accelerate land commodification. Pérez argues that when density use is naturalized and taken out of the political arena, what gets propped up is “the logic of the market” (2020: 634). As the next section details, the generous density reward for large-site development has greatly enlarged real estate capital's acquisitive appetite for land profit, resulting in aggressive land hunts and heightened land commodification in Central North. Through their depoliticizing effects, density techniques have become a crucial vehicle for speculative urbanism.

Central North: the material landscape of heightened land commodification

In 2013, the New Taipei city government, under the central government's approval, carried out a state-led land readjustment project in Central North, Xindian District. The almost 40 hectares of farmlands consisted of thousands of small land parcels owned by more than 1200 farmers. These privately owned, naturally formed, and still productive urban farmlands were expropriated, pooled together, and redrawn into street blocks, and finally upzoned for residential development. Landowners whose lands were larger than 250 m² were given the option to receive about 40% of the original landholdings as in-kind compensation and therefore the opportunity to stay put (Interview, June 2019).⁶ The remaining land, after deducting public facilities (roads, parks, schools, etc.), was market-auctioned to the highest bidding real estate developers to finance the project. This is a land readjustment scheme that builds entirely on an individualistic, market-driven financing mechanism that aims to valorize land's future monetary value and is often inherently ill-suited for democratic planning and equitable development (Balakrishnan, 2019; Shih and de Laurentis, 2022).

The material landscape of the new Central North is the resulting spatialized outcome of five formulaic density rules. As Table 1 shows, among the 18 real estate projects analyzed in this article, a majority of them used Large-Site Development (15), followed by Green Building (13), TDR (8), Social Housing (3), and a single Smart Building (1). Together, they produce a landscape of intensified, large-scale, luxury residential development in the new Central North. Although the baseline FAR is 240%, the actual FARs range from 271% to 384%. The three minimum lot sizes are 100 m², 300 m², and 500 m²; the actual development sites range from 1240 m² to 9981 m². The housing market prices range from about 5500 to 7790 USD/m², or equivalent to roughly 635 thousand to 900 thousand USD for an average-size apartment,⁷ which many of our interviewees said were among the highest in the city (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Intensified, large-scale real estate development in Central North.

Table 1.

Use of TDR and density bonusing.

Project #	Site area (m²)	FAR (baseline: 240%)	Total extra density (m²)	Bonusing (m²)				TDR (m²)	Estimated TDR purchase time
Project #	Site area (m²)	FAR (baseline: 240%)	Total extra density (m²)	Large-site development	Green building	Smart building	Social housing	TDR (m²)	Estimated TDR purchase time
1	8389	384%	13,352 (100%)	3020 (23%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	2279 (17%)	8053 (60%)	2016
2	6624	340%	6627 (100%)	2384 (36%)	477 (7%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	3766 (57%)	2017
3	5102	354%	5824 (100%)	1837 (32%)	367 (6%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	3620 (62%)	2018
4	3081	384%	5278 (100%)	739 (14%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	1581 (30%)	2958 (56%)	2016
5	9981	288%	4791 (100%)	3593 (75%)	1198 (25%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
6	6405	304%	4086 (100%)	2306 (56%)	461 (11%)	307 (8%)	0 (0%)	1011 (25%)	2019
7	8083	283%	3492 (100%)	2910 (83%)	582 (17%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
8	6474	283%	2797 (100%)	2331 (83%)	466 (17%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
9	5000	288%	2400 (100%)	1800 (75%)	600 (25%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
10	5548	283%	2397 (100%)	1997 (83%)	399 (17%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
11	5450	283%	2354 (100%)	1962 (83%)	392 (17%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
12	4770	290%	2290 (100%)	1145 (50%)	343 (15%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	801 (35%)	2016
13	2914	288%	1399 (100%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	1399 (100%)	0 (0%)
14	1926	312%	1387 (100%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	1387 (100%)	2018
15	1240	336%	1190 (100%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	1190 (100%)	2016
16	3063	278%	1176 (100%)	735 (63%)	441 (37%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
17	3081	271%	961 (100%)	739 (77%)	222 (23%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)
18	3000	271%	936 (100%)	720 (77%)	216 (23%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)	0 (0%)

These density formulas also enable real estate professionals, land brokers, and property developers to focus on calculating the costs and benefits associated with each density device, developing a preference ranking among all possible density sources, and accelerating land sale deals with higher land purchase prices boosted by density bonuses. This is an urban world that is made financially calculable by density techniques.

“Not every density is the same”: calculative practices of density

One immediate consequence of formula-based density rules is that real estate developers are given free rein to choose the most financially advantageous source even though it has the least social benefit to the public. In Central North, our interviewees unanimously agreed that Large-Site Development is the most generous, hassle-free, and therefore, preferred device of density bonusing. If a site is larger than 3000 m², an additional 15% baseline FAR of 240% is granted; if 1500 m², 10%. Land brokers and development consultants call it “a bonus with no strings attached” (wuliao jiangli), referring to the fact that the real estate developer is burdened by nothing except the size of the development area. Of the 18 projects analyzed, 15 used Large-Site Development. One real estate professional called Large-Site Development a “great tonic (henbu)” to development financing. The performative effect of density techniques was further made clear when he described how “when the development company buys land, what it tries to do is to buy as much as possible so as to receive [density] bonuses for large-site development. So, at the very beginning, it keeps buying, buying, and buying” (Interview, June 2020). With boosted confidence in future sale profit, real estate developers are emboldened to engage in aggressive land hunting, buying, and assembling in order to pass the size threshold.

Green Building and Smart Building grant extra density of 5% and 3% baseline FAR, respectively. Both need to pass certification criteria before receiving density bonuses. Green Building is a much more popular practice because developers tend to be able to set higher sale prices for apartment buildings officially certified for their status of being environmentally sustainable. Thirteen of the 18 projects utilized Green Building. In contrast, interest in Smart Building is lukewarm. Our interviewees told us it is more costly and time-consuming to build a certified smart building because specialized construction methods and official inspection of each building floor are required. In addition, the density reward is a meager 3%. This is clearly reflected in the fact that only one project used Smart Building as a density source.

The TDR formula measures the grantable density bonus based on the amount of reserved land donated. Because of this flexibility, real estate developers also prefer to use TDR even though all our interviewees agreed that in booming real estate markets, such as in the Xindian District where Central North is located, reserved land is more expensive. Eight of the 18 projects used TDR.

Social Housing is the second least popular density source in Central North. Only 3 of the 18 projects utilized it. Real estate developers tend to shy away from Social Housing because of the perceived negativity and uncertainty associated with it. Social Housing works on a one-to-two exchange rule—for every unit of floor area built for social housing, one unit is granted and another is exempted from being counted in the building's FAR. In Taiwan, social housing means government-owned, managed, rent-subsidized units. There is a shared reluctance, however, to mix social housing units with market-rate units—even though they are located on separate floors—because it is believed that social housing drags down housing sale prices. In addition, a separate official review process is required to approve supporting design and facility requirements. Real estate developers see this as a cumbersome undertaking, especially given the availability of other generous and straightforward density channels. One interviewee said, “all of these [negotiations and reviews] need to be settled first before [development] can proceed. That is why most developers are reluctant to go down the path of [social housing]” (Interview, June 2019).

Aggressive land hunts and transaction negotiations

The calculation of each density rule's cost–benefit implications into a dollar amount becomes a niche market performed by the so-called density consultants (rongji zixun) in real estate development. For each new development project, the density consultant performs multiple combinations of density sources and quantities to estimate project profitability before a final recommendation is made to the real estate developer (Interview, June 2021). For costs, only the additional expenses specific to the particular density source are calculated. For example, in a “density analysis report” provided to us by a consultant, the density cost for Large-Site Development is listed as zero, while Social Housing includes a cost item for future maintenance, and Smart Building has an increase in construction costs due to the special material and engineering methods required. For revenues, additional density is first converted into salable floor area and is then multiplied by the unit housing sale price that the real estate developer set for the area. Almost all developers, land brokers, and consultants interviewed for this article confirmed that an across-the-board requirement for profit return is 20% of a project's total sale revenues.

With all the estimates at hand, the real estate developer then applies the residual land valuation methods to gauge how aggressively the project can afford to engage in land hunting. The residual methods deduct the total density costs (plus other necessary marketing and management expenses, such as advertisement and fees) from the total density revenues. The difference (i.e. residual) is the maximum land purchase price the project can hypothetically expend while meeting the developer's requirement of a 20% profit margin. As a default practice, density consultants also perform an analysis of the project's financing without any extra density. Reading the two estimates side by side, one with density rewards and the other without, gives the developer a good idea of how high a land purchase price the project is ready to make (Interview, June 2021).

Fortified by the project's density and profit estimates, land brokers working on behalf of real estate developers handle land hunts with calculated precision and speed. Before heading out into the field, land brokers run mock negotiations to familiarize themselves with the calculations in terms of how much more the project can afford to pay for land in the present given the amount of extra density the project expects to receive in the future. On the ground, land brokers forego attempts to negotiate land purchase prices down. Rather, as long as the landowner's asking price falls within the acceptable profit range afforded by extra density, land brokers immediately accept with a deposit check on the spot; “otherwise another broker will follow up right away and [the land] is gone” (Interview, July 2020). This acceleration of price negotiations and land transactions is a result of density formulas that are predictable, quantifiable, and devoid of community participation.

Density boosterism's price-lifting effects

To estimate how much more daring density boosterism has made property developers in buying land with higher prices, we analyzed 18 real estate development projects in Central North. We collected official records published by the city government's “Review Committee on Urban Design and Land Development Permission”⁸ to compile which density sources each project uses and for how much extra buildable floor area. Table 1 shows each project's density breakdown, ranked by the total amount of extra density in decreasing order. Because earlier TDR cases tended to pay less for reserved lands, Table 1 also includes the estimated year of TDR purchase based on government permits.

We mimic the standard calculative practice of residual valuation performed by real estate professionals to estimate each density tool's maximum lifting effect on land purchase prices. At its simplest equation, the residual model is:

LP = SR – (CC + NP)

(1)

where LP is the land purchase price; SR is the total sale revenue; CC is the total construction cost; and NP is the net profit required by the developer.

We further expand and refine the original equation into Equation (2) after interviewing real estate finance analysts and land brokers who have first-hand knowledge of land hunts, negotiations, and development financing in Central North. Equation (2) now captures all relevant costs and revenues associated with extra-density use. In addition to the total construction cost CC (which also includes advertisement, management, other administrative fees, etc.), LC represents the interest payments on construction loans that developers need to pay to the lending bank, and TDR is the total money the developer pays to reserved landowners. 20% SR is the threshold profit return that developers anticipate and require in Central North.⁹ We make sure to use the most conservative scenarios and parameters in our calculations. For example, we use the highest interest rate to compute interest payments for loans, exclude pre-sale revenue¹⁰ and opt for the longest sale time to calculate incurred costs, while at the same time using the smallest salable area and lowest sale price when computing revenues.

Because we are interested in the effect of density granting on the land purchase price, Equation (2) measures additional costs and revenues incurred due to extra density. TDR is a one-time separate payment to owners of reserved land; therefore, it is not associated with an incremental increase (i.e. no delta sign):

Δ LP = Δ SR – (Δ CC + Δ LC + Δ NP + TDR), where Δ NP \geq 20 % Δ SR

(2)

Table 2 shows the estimation results for each density's maximum price-lifting effects. Our interpretations and discussions are as follows:

Extra density allows all but one project (14) to lift land purchase prices (i.e. △LP) even after accounting for the net profit at 20% of total sales. Overall, the positive price-lifting effect ranges from about 700 USD/m² (Project 2) to 4600 USD/m² (Project 18). Using Project 2, which has the smallest lifting effect, as an example, the interpretation is that even after the developer pays a maximum additional 671 USD/m² to the landowner, Project 2 will still make a net profit at 20% of the total sale. If a lower purchase price is offered, the project could yield an even greater net profit. The fact that almost all of the projects can offer an uplift in land purchase price suggests that the overall rising land prices in Central North are the result of density tools.

It does not appear that a higher amount of extra density is correlated with a higher price-lifting effect. This is because many other factors—such as the sale price set by each real estate project, whether a building's intensified height requires more stringent and costly construction inputs, and when TDR is purchased—affect the cost–revenue analysis. For example, Project 1 uses the greatest amount of extra density (13,352 m²), but its average sale price is set at about 6490 USD/m², a median-to-low price in Central North. Several interviewees also mentioned that Project 1 is designed for real estate investors but not for home buyers. It has numerous smaller units and fewer public spaces on each floor, a design feature that many interviewees believed was the reason its developer was willing to include social housing in the building.

When considering density bonusing only, all four measures contribute positively to land purchase prices. Particularly, Large-Site Development has the greatest lifting effect when not considering TDR (discussed below), confirming what our interviewees explained to us about the popularity of this “no-strings-attached” density bonus. Smart Building, which requires the highest unit construction cost, has the smallest, but still positive, uplift effect.

Among the eight projects that used TDR, in four projects (2, 3, 6, 14) TDR generates a negative effect on land purchase price. Two factors help to explain this. First, the purchase cost of TDR increased quickly after 2016 before it gradually stabilized after 2018 in Central North. The annual increase rate was about 63% in 2016 and 56% in 2017 before it went down significantly to 9% and 5% in 2018 and 2019. As a result, the earlier the TDR takes place, the cheaper it is. Both Projects 3 and 14 purchased TDR in 2018, and Project 6 in 2019, resulting in high costs. In addition, TDR accounts for a large share of the total extra density for these four projects. Particularly, Projects 2, 3, and 14, respectively, sourced 57%, 62%, and 100% of their total extra density from TDR, generating a significant cost item. In contrast, for projects that used TDR the earliest, in 2016 (1, 4, 12, 15), TDR does have a positive and rather large effect on land purchase prices.

When interpreting TDR's negative effect on land purchase price for these four projects (2, 3, 6, 14), one needs to keep in mind that the calculation is based on the assumption that the net profit is 20% of the total sale. We test how much smaller the net profit needs to be for TDR to have at least a non-negative effect (i.e. to offset the TDR purchase cost entirely). TDR is Project 14's only source of extra density, and its high cost presses down the land purchase price by 177 USD/m². However, if the net profit rate is 18.33%, the TDR cost stops weighing the price down. For Projects 2, 3, and 6, TDR is one of several sources of extra density. For Projects 2 and 3, the net profit rate would need to go down to 6.86% and 11.99%, respectively, to offset the high cost of TDR. For Project 6, TDR cost is higher than the revenue it generates, which means the cost cannot be offset by a lower profit rate. However, taking into account all sources of extra density, all three projects still have an overall positive effect on land purchase price. This means that the developers are still able to raise the land purchase price even after raking in a 20% net profit. Projects 2 and 6 in fact belong to the same real estate development company. This is not uncommon in Central North. More than one interviewee told us that when a developer runs multiple projects in the same area, the developer can sometimes allow a lower profit rate for one particular project because many costs are shared among projects: for example, the same team of people working on all projects. Our calculations, however, do not reflect these cost-sharing mechanisms and effects.

When Social Housing is used together with other density sources, it has the smallest lifting effect on land purchase price (Projects 1 and 4), while Large-Site Development and TDR (when purchased earlier) drive land purchase prices much higher. When used alone in Project 13, Social Housing has a moderate price-lifting effect of $2116/m² (the 11^th highest). Project 13 consists of three buildings, and the 12 social housing units, which are all located in one single building, aim to provide housing for “young entrepreneurs,” a new housing development focus recently promoted by the city government.

Table 2.

Estimated increase in land purchase price (USD/m²).

Project #	Project as a whole	Large-site development	Green building	Smart building	Social housing	TDR
1	3377 (100%)	1357 (40%)	-	-	265 (8%)	1754 (52%)
2	671 (100%)	1199 (179%)	240 (36%)	-	-	−767 (−114%)
3	1263 (100%)	1515 (120%)	303 (24%)	-	-	−555 (−44%)
4	2531 (100%)	734 (29%)	-	-	449 (18%)	1348 (53%)
5	3000 (100%)	2250 (75%)	750 (25%)	-	-	-
6	2148 (100%)	2043 (95%)	409 (19%)	272 (13%)	-	−576 (−27%)
7	4356 (100%)	3630 (83%)	726 (17%)	-	-	-
8	4346 (100%)	3622 (83%)	724 (17%)	-	-	-
9	1796 (100%)	1347 (75%)	449 (25%)	-	-	-
10	4180 (100%)	3483 (83%)	697 (17%)	-	-	-
11	3531 (100%)	2943 (83%)	589 (17%)	-	-	-
12	3223 (100%)	2156 (67%)	647 (20%)	-	-	420 (13%)
13	2116 (100%)	-	-	-	2116 (100%)	-
14	−177 (−100%)	-	-	-	-	−177 (−100%)
15	818 (100%)	-	-	-	-	818 (100%)
16	1989 (100%)	1243 (63%)	746 (37%)	-	-	-
17	1587 (100%)	1221(77%)	366 (23%)	-	-	-
18	4598 (100%)	3537 (77%)	1061(23%)	-	-	-

Conclusion

In this article, we examine and make explicit the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, their depoliticization effects, and heightened land commodification in Taiwan's acceleration to a real estate–oriented economy. The technocratic approach to density institutionally discourages the social negotiation of density practices while enabling planners to embed their epistemic values and rational judgment in the circuit of real estate capital within the urban built environment. The effect of density techniques is as depoliticizing as it is financial. Formulaic density rules enable real estate developers to engage in calculative practices fully: density enters cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets as a profit booster in advance of its actual granting; in the absence of community negotiation, development financing focuses on landowners and land sales as the singularly most important variable to control, which is achieved via higher land purchase offers; in anticipation of and emboldened by density profits, aggressive land hunting facilitates an inflationary land market in which land brokering, buying, and selling churn up land prices. In other words, bracketing density use within technical rules has played a formative role in land commodification and speculative urbanism.

Central North is the material and spatialized outcome of depoliticizing density techniques. A cluster of intensified, large-scale, luxury residential buildings has transformed what was recently urban farmland into one of the most expensive housing markets in the city. Mimicking the real estate sector's calculative practice, we employ residual valuation methods to estimate each density tool's maximum price-lifting effects. We find that formulaic density rules produce not only a general effect of price lifting but also a particular pattern of land development. Both TDR and density bonusing are a boost to the speculative real estate market. All but one project lifted land purchase prices. In particular, the technocratic approach has given real estate developers free rein in favoring density tools that maximize profit accumulation, such as Large-Site Development, while avoiding those of greater benefit to the public, such as Social Housing. It is then crucial here to remind ourselves that heightened land commodification does not ensnare everyone in the city evenly. One of Mitchell's critiques of land commodification is the lasting effect of “an intertemporal transfer of wealth” (2007: 262): that while investors and owners cream off land profits in the present, people who save for housing now will find themselves struggling to stay put in a more commodified, inflationary, unaffordable urban land and housing market in the future. Those who are young, landless, and lower income will be disproportionally hurt. By deploying TDR and density bonusing deliberately to “reduce human interpretations,” planners at best unintentionally allow the real estate market to hijack their well-intentioned attempt to build a supposedly good city form; at worst, they knowingly sanitize public contestation of density tools to enable calculative practices of real estate development finance. The speculative urbanism that is spatialized in Central North is the resulting urban economy, and urban struggle, into which density techniques have locked us.

Centering today's even deeper monetizing treatment of land in density techniques produces important insights into how we understand urban land development as well as how to mobilize collective actions around urban struggles over the commodified city. If higher land prices and a more speculative land market are the collective cost that is carried by the society as a whole and burdens the vulnerable disproportionally, local governments at the very least have a political responsibility to democratize density use. Necessary measures that help ensure such political accountability include but are not limited to: release all information surrounding density granting and use as open data prior to the fact of real estate development; assess the impact of density granting on housing affordability and land prices, and make such assessment outcomes publicly available; and significantly expand institutional spaces so that communities and the larger public can meaningfully question and challenge why a particular density rule and reward is made. In addition, there should be a serious overhaul of density rules, with a specific focus on eliminating bonusing rules with “no strings attached,” which, as our analysis shows, drive land prices the most, while prioritizing those of greater public benefit and smaller price lifting effect, such as social housing.

To move density from a domain of technical rules and real estate finance is to move it to a politics of land. To create conditions for a politics of land in which the abovementioned reforms are thinkable and actionable is to politicize density techniques that otherwise richly enable calculative real estate finance. Desiree Fields argues that to politicize financialization entails making critical inquiries into urban struggles so that “the relationship between the abstractions of finance and the concreteness of urban places and everyday lives becomes most apparent” (2017: 7). We need to relentlessly press planners, real estate agents, and ourselves with questions such as: On what basis is a development behavior worthy of density rewards? How does our density use reflect what we value as a society? Why is Large-Site Development the most density worthy in Central North? Whose values are we materializing through such a density practice? Who decides? At whose cost? Why is private market development the context in which social housing (or other public benefits) is produced? What are the alternatives?

To mobilize a social process of critical inquiries is also to turn calculative techniques on their heads. Rather than teaching development financing models—for example, the residual valuation methods employed in this article—only for the narrow end of legitimizing planners’ technical expertise, critical urban scholars should find ways to mobilize them as a community engagement and negotiation tool. These calculative techniques should be made widely accessible to communities so as to empower residents to ask informed questions, articulate the impacts of land commodification, and engage in a social negotiation of density use. If density is a profoundly generative practice, it is too important to be left only in the hands of planners and the real estate market.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

Kathe Newman, Robert Lake, and Laura Wolf-Powers read early drafts of this article and gave constructive comments. An earlier version was presented at the virtual conference “Negotiating Social Futures: The Politics of Land Development and Value Capture During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic” on September 23-24, 2021, where discussions helped us work through ideas in the article. The conference is one of three events supported by an Urban Studies Foundation's Seminar Series Award (USF-SSA-210213). Jiayu Zhou provided excellent graduate research assistance. To our interviewees, who remain anonymous in the article, we give our deepest thanks. Shortcomings remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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