This book studies the cultural framework of the connections between homeownership and social stability in Hong Kong. In the post-war period, homeownership became the most preferable housing choice in developed societies, such as Australia, Britain, Japan, Spain, and the United States. In the financialization era, its proliferation aggregated enormous wealth and debt in the housing and mortgage markets, affecting social stability by creating inequality and housing unaffordability. Hong Kong is the most extreme example of this among developed societies – in recent years, the city has made international headlines both for its housing problem and its social instability. By studying the history of homeownership in Hong Kong over a period of four decades, Chung-kin Tsang proposes that homeownership is inseparable from the social imagination of the future, conceptualizing this framework as "hope mechanism". This perspective helps trace the connections between ‘House Buying’ as a hope mechanism – one which is central to subject formation, life goals, and temporal mapping for socially shared life planning – and social stability. Given its unique approach, specifically its use of "hope" as an analytical category, this book will prove to be a useful resource for scholars in economic culture and financialization, and Asian Studies, especially those working on the cultural, sociopolitical, and economic history of Hong Kong.

First published in 1999, this volume examines the issue that, in the last two decades, the housing system in Hong Kong has witnessed a slow but consistent transition from a tenure dominated by public rental housing to one dominated by private home ownership. This book seeks to explain the unique social organization of home ownership in contemporary Hong Kong. Specifically, the book deals with the genesis of home ownership from three areas: housing histories, family culture and capital gains from home transactions. It is agreed that extreme deprivations in housing conditions in early lives, a strong family culture of mutual help as well as unprecedented capital gains, all contribute towards explaining the complex nature of home ownership growth. In conclusion the book suggests that with China regaining sovereignty after July 1997, the social organization of home ownership will be further complicated by more internal migrations from other parts of China, making housing problems even more acute.

In recent years many nations have asked why not enough housing is being built or, when it is built, why it isn't of the highest quality or in the best, most sustainable, locations. Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong examines the politics and planning of new homes in three very different settings, but with shared political traditions: in Australia, in England and in Hong Kong. It investigates the power-relationships and politics that underpin the allocation of land for large-scale residential schemes and the processes and politics that lead to particular development outcomes. Using a comparative framework, it asks: how different systems of urban governance and planning mediate the supply of land for housing; whether and how these system differences influence the location, quantity and price of residential land and the implications for housing outcomes; what can be learned from these different systems for allocating land, building consensus between different stakeholders, and delivering a steady supply of high quality and well located homes accessible to, and appropriate for, diverse housing needs. This book frames each case study in a comprehensive examination of national and territorial frameworks before dissecting key local cases. These local cases – urban renewal and greenfield growth centres in Australia, new towns and strategic sites in England, and major development schemes in Hong Kong – explore how broader urban planning and housing policy goals play out at the local level. While the book highlights a number of potential strategies for improving planning and housing delivery processes, the real challenge is to give voice to a broader array of interests, reconstituting the political process surrounding planning and housing development to prioritise homes in well-planned places for the many, rather than simply facilitating investment opportunities for the few.

This book examines housing policy in Hong Kong using a new and unique interdisciplinary approach – combining the philosophical discussion on social justice with policy and housing studies. It considers both Western and Chinese concepts of social justice, and investigates the role of social justice in a public policy such as housing. As a philosophical treatise on social administration, the book will be of interest to philosophy, public administration, and housing studies academics and students of all countries. Since Hong Kong represents a very special case with massive governmental intervention into the housing market, housing professionals and policy makers will find the analysis of Hong Kong's housing policy useful.

Hong Kong Public Housing provides the first comprehensive history of one of the most dramatic episodes in the global history of the modern built environment: the vast public housing programme sponsored by successive Hong Kong governments from the 1950s, in a quest to build up the territory into a lasting ‘people’s home’. And unlike many of its counterparts elsewhere, this is a programme still ongoing today – a case of ‘history in progress’ – as Hong Kong now boasts one of the world’s longest-lasting public housing programmes. During that time, it has been not just a mirror of the cultural and economic values of Hong Kong society but also a reflection of more nebulous, fast-changing perceptions of identity – and a testament to the community-building achievements of Hongkongers over these years. This authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, and cultural aspects of housing production – particularly the geo-political issues of sovereignty and decolonisation that uniquely, and fundamentally, structured the trajectory of Hong Kong public housing and territory development. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and administrative governance, it shows how massive state intervention interacted at times uneasily with Hong Kong’s dominant laissez-faire ethos, to help maintain the legitimacy of successive administrations during an era of ‘auto-decolonisation’, and support an interstitial society suspended between two sovereignties. Following more recent political changes, Hong Kong’s public housing heritage has also become a focus of nostalgic community pride – a monumental achievement of ‘home building’ which this book documents and celebrates for posterity.

When Britain and China negotiated the future of Hong Kong in the early 1980s, their primary concern was about maintaining the status quo. The rise of China in the last thirty years, however, has reshaped the Beijing-Hong Kong dynamic as new tensions and divisions have emerged. Thus, post-1997 Hong Kong is a case about a global city’s democratic transition within an authoritarian state. The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Hong Kong introduces readers to these key social, economic, and political developments. Bringing together the work of leading researchers in the field, it focuses on the process of transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region under China’s sovereign rule. Organized thematically, the sections covered include: ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in practice Governance in post-colonial Hong Kong Social mobilization The changing social fabric of Hong Kong society Socio-economic development and regional integration The future of Hong Kong. This book provides a thorough introduction to Hong Kong today. As such, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of Hong Kong’s politics, culture and society. It will also be of interest to those studying Chinese political development and the impact of China’s rise more generally.

This book investigates how housing policy changes in Asia since the late 1990s have impacted on housing affordability, security, livability, culture and social development. Using case study examples from countries/cities including China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, the contributors contextualize housing policy development in terms of both global and local socio-economic and political changes. They then investigate how policy changes have shaped and re-shaped the housing wellbeing of the local people and the social development within these places, which they argue should constitute the core purpose of housing policy. This book will open up a new dimension for understanding housing and social development in Asia and a new conceptual perspective with which to examine housing which, by nature, is culture-sensitive and people-oriented. It will be of interest to students, scholars and professionals in the areas of housing studies, urban and social development and the public and social policy of Asia.

This book reveals an insider's view on how Hong Kong's land system, inherited from the British, has helped to create unrivalled wealth for the ruling class, how the lack of competition law has encouraged industrial and economic concentration in the same entities, and how these factors have given rise to a host of social and economic ills. The Chinese version has become the bestseller of non-fiction titles in Hong Kong in 2010.

Public housing was once an important strand in western housing policies, but is seldom seen as a mainstream policy instrument for the future. In contrast, in many East Asian countries large public housing programs are underway. Behind these generalizations, there are exceptions, too. By including perspectives of scholars from across the world, this book provides new insights into public housing in its various forms. It contains in-depth chapters on public housing in five East Asian countries and six Western countries, together with three comparative overview chapters.

In the 1880s, Hong Kong was a booming colonial entrepôt, with many European, especially British, residents living in palatial mansions in the Mid-Levels and at the Peak. But it was also a ruthless migrant city where Chinese workers shared bedspaces in the crowded tenements of Taipingshan. Despite persistent inequality, Hong Kong never ceased to attract different classes of sojourners and immigrants, who strived to advance their social standing by accumulating wealth, especially through land and property speculation. In this engaging and extensively illustrated book, Cecilia L. Chu retells the ‘Hong Kong story’ by tracing the emergence of its ‘speculative landscape’ from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a number of pivotal case studies, she highlights the contradictory logic of colonial urban development: the encouragement of native investment that supported a laissez-faire housing market, versus the imperative to segregate the populations in a hierarchical, colonial spatial order. Crucially, she shows that the production of Hong Kong’s urban landscapes was not a top-down process, but one that evolved through ongoing negotiations between different constituencies with vested interests in property. Further, her study reveals that the built environment was key to generating and attaining individual and collective aspirations in a racially divided, highly unequal, but nevertheless upwardly mobile, modernizing colonial city.