Urban Studies

Land conversion control in China remains in the shadow of the planned economy. Highly hierarchical governments fully control both land quotas and land approval, which are indispensable for each added area of construction land. But the actual mechanisms of land resource distribution, because they are masked by the ambiguity of institutional provisions, are opaque. This article discusses the theoretical influence of regional favouritism to birthplace on the expansion of construction land. Using a provincial-level dataset and detailed information about political cadres in the Ministry of Land and Resources, we estimate an econometric model that reflects the relationship between regional favouritism and construction land expansion. The results indicate that, all else equal, the birthplaces of political cadres receive a larger scale of construction land expansion than other locations. We further explore the paths of regional favouritism influencing construction land expansion. The results show that land approval and tolerance of illegal land due to regional favouritism together contribute to the expansion of construction land.

Value capture offers the promise of recouping the additional value that public transportation infrastructure investments confer to local property. The totality of the empirical evidence supports the contention that such investments do indeed add value to proximate residential property. However, little research to estimate just how much any additional property value changes from year to year is evident in the empirical literature. The absence of evidence on the reliability of accessibility premiums is problematic from a policy perspective because transit operators need dedicated sources of funds to compensate for the retrenchment of government sources. Adoption of a multilevel approach expands the temporal scale of analysis to more than a decade and the spatial scale of analysis to an entire heavy rail system, Metro in Washington, District of Columbia (DC), in order to estimate just how much accessibility premiums change year over year. Results advance the state of knowledge on value capture since public rail infrastructure adds property value across an entire heavy rail system, but the additional value is modest and the year-to-year changes are dramatic. Overall, a strategy to capture any additional property value to fund public transportation may technically qualify as a dedicated source of funds, but it is not a reliable source of funds.

Housing commodification has led to the development of gated neighbourhoods in China. However, the types of gated neighbourhoods are very different from each other, and include ‘commodity housing’, affordable housing and resettlement housing. They might not be the same as the commonly known ‘gated communities’, which are characterised by both gating and private governance. Using three cases in the city of Wenzhou, we analyse the motivations for development, service provision and property management, and neighbourhood control. In commodity housing, the state is still visible and self-governance is limited, while the real estate developer leads land development and property management. In affordable housing, the state regulates the standards and the prices of services, while the developer is the provider of these services. In resettlement housing, the state uses a state-owned enterprise to relocate households, while the homeowners’ association and the service charges are ineffective. All these cases demonstrate the important and variegated role of the state and provide a more nuanced understanding of these gated neighbourhoods.

Providing access to a variety of healthy and affordable foods has been the goal of several federal and state policy initiatives in the USA. The first step towards the successful implementation of these initiatives is to identify food deserts and to understand the mechanism by which food deserts arise. This national-level study investigates the association between urban sprawl and the emergence of food deserts at both regional and neighbourhood levels. Multilevel analysis is used to model the likelihood of a census tract being a food desert, controlling for sociodemographic and built environmental characteristics. We find that urban sprawl, measured via a compactness index, holds a significant association with the likelihood of a census tract being a food desert. Specifically, a one unit increase in the compactness index is associated with a 5.6% decrease in the odds of a census tract being a food desert. In conclusion, we recommend increasing the land use density, mix and walkability of neighbourhoods to create a supportive and attractive environment for food retailers in which to invest.

The literature on urban financialisation has prioritised the analysis of what finance does in the context of industrialised countries. This paper contributes to an understanding of what it is, and specifically how it emerges from the entanglements between the accumulation of intergovernmental debt, pricing and valuation practices – involving state and municipal utilities, regulatory agencies and consultancies – in the gradual transformation of shared into shareholder water governance in Brazilian metropolitan areas. Moreover, we provide a first illustration of how a more articulate approach between political economics and social studies of finance might contribute to an understanding of the making of urban financialisation, with a particular relevance for a context of less developed capital markets.

Strong social connections often deter residential mobility beyond reach of the social network. A missing link in the body of research on this subject is the significance of the role of social networks in pooling resources for costly services and neighbourhood-level access to social services. Few have explored whether assistance from local social service agencies may substitute for practical help from social networks, thereby enabling low-income assisted renters to locate housing in more desirable neighbourhoods. Relying on data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment, this article examines the impact of social networks and social services on the dynamics of residential mobility. I find that the existence of social networks in the place movers left behind tends to increase the likelihood of moving back, but this likelihood varies with current access to social service providers and distance moved. These findings suggest that policy efforts in spatial dispersion of poverty should pay close attention to the geography of social services.

Using a large Chinese household survey data set, we investigate the effect of home value appreciation on urban household consumption. The paper identifies the causal effect of housing wealth using both Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimates and regression discontinuity designs. The research demonstrates that the housing boom in China has resulted in higher consumption and that a 10% increase in home wealth raises overall consumption by approximately 3%. The average marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is about 5 cents with substantial heterogeneity across household characteristics. The findings highlight the role of mortgage debts, health insurance, education and risk preference in explaining the variation in household consumption. Our results persist when we adopt different proxies for housing wealth.

The smart city has been both celebrated for opening up decision-making processes through responsive digital infrastructures, and criticised for turning citizens into mere nodes of socio-technical networks under corporate or government control. In line with these depictions, smart city politics is often analysed as a struggle between aspirations for bottom-up participatory democracy and authoritarian control. Drawing on ethnographic research on an Amsterdam project which encourages citizens to collect and share air quality data, we problematise this vertical reading of smart city politics. The project mobilises both republican citizenship and cybernetic citizenship, each assuming different logics regarding the ways in which citizens negotiate urban life by means of data and sensing technologies. While republican citizenship emphasises citizens’ sovereignty, cybernetic citizenship emphasises their immersion into informational environments. We demonstrate how, depending on specific situated interests and forms of engagement, both kinds of citizenship feed into appealing visions of urban life for different actors.

Despite growing signs of urban shrinkage in countries such as Korea, Japan and China, few studies have examined the generalisable pattern of urban shrinkage and its relationship to the characteristics of housing abandonment in the East Asian context. This study explores five major paths that may explain the emergence of vacant houses in declining inner-city areas, based on empirical observations in the city of Incheon, South Korea. The paths are: (1) strong government-led new built-up area development plans (pull factor for population movement); (2) delay and cancellation of indiscriminate redevelopment projects (push factor for population movement); (3) initial poor development and concentration of substandard houses; (4) aging of the elderly population; and (5) the outflow of infrastructure and services. These paths, also found in Japan or China, are expected to be combined in a local context, leading to more serious housing abandonment. This study suggests that it is important to take appropriate countermeasures based on the identification of the paths causing vacant houses.

Did the socialist experiment disrupt continuity in Russian urban housing? Based on a unique collection of urban data covering several hundred Russian cities and spanning three regimes across more than a century, this paper gives a nuanced account of continuities and discontinuities of housing in post-Soviet cities. Three main housing characteristics are analysed: urban density (persons per building and living space per capita), ownership structure and the modernisation of stock (building material and provision with amenities). Although all Russian cities underwent a number of major shocks and regime changes during the course of the 20th century, their rankings with regard to these three key housing characteristics are still significantly correlated over time, whereas living space per capita is largely uncorrelated over time. This holds true despite significant convergence processes in almost all dimensions and also when including contemporary control variables. We hypothesise that local or regional building traditions, regional differentiation in Soviet urban planning as well as Soviet land use specificities could explain differential growth across cities. Going beyond existing late-Soviet-legacy timeframes, the long-term perspective reveals that even major regime shocks did not completely erase regionally shaped patterns in housing conditions.

The ‘bamboo network’ is used to conceptualise the investment flow into China from the Chinese diaspora, particularly those who resided in South-east Asia. However, global economic events have decimated the wealth of overseas Chinese whilst mainland Chinese businesses prospered, resulting in what is now reimagined as the ‘reverse bamboo network’. In Iskandar Malaysia (IM), which is a transnational economic region bordering Singapore, the foreign direct investment in housing (FDIH) from China has surpassed that of IM’s more prosperous neighbour Singapore, yet the interscalar interactions between market and actors in FDIH have yet to be unpacked. The aim of this paper is to examine how mainland Chinese developers operate within a bamboo network country by arguing that the similar socioculture helps in moderating institutionalised barriers, such as the unfamiliar legal framework and local personnel management. Framed by the ‘reverse bamboo network’ argument and underpinned by the sociocultural explanation, this paper explains the spatial and business transformations caused by FDIH from China. Data and information from desk research and fieldwork are used to construct macro-, meso- and micro-level dialectics in the paper. Ultimately, this paper argues that the sociocultural dialectic provides a complementary explanation of transnational shapers of the urban space in IM, and having political and cultural allies in the host country could tremendously improve business operations of international developers.