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2019 | Book

Centering Housing Questions in Asian Cities Read chapter Read first chapter

Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia

Editors: Yi-Ling Chen, Hyun Bang Shin

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

Book Series : The Contemporary City

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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About this book

Considering Asian cities ranging from Taipei, Hong Kong and Bangkok to Hanoi, Nanjing and Seoul, this collection discusses the socio-political processes of how neoliberalization entwines with local political economies and legacies of ‘developmental’ or ‘socialist’ statism to produce urban contestations centered on housing. The book takes housing as a key entry point, given its prime position in the making of social and economic policies as well as the political legitimacy of Asian states. It examines urban policies related to housing in Asian economies in order to explore their continuing alterations and mutations, as they come into conflict and coalesce with neoliberal policies. In discussing the experience of each city, it takes into consideration the variegated relations between the state, the market and the society, and explores how the global pressure of neoliberalization has manifested in each country and has influenced the shaping of national housing questions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Centering Housing Questions in Asian Cities
Abstract
The chapter discusses how important housing questions are for Asian cities and citizens in the contemporary era of neoliberalization. It highlights the importance of understanding the path-dependent nature of neoliberalization, especially in the context of Asia’s condensed development under the developmentalist states. It also shows how housing has been at the heart of urban contestations in Asian cities, especially given its significance for wealth generation and upward class mobility when the formation of middle classes would have been the state’s legitimacy project. The chapter concludes by providing a summary of each contributing chapter.
Yi-Ling Chen, Hyun Bang Shin
Chapter 2. ‘Re-occupying the State’: Social Housing Movement and the Transformation of Housing Policies in Taiwan
Abstract
Since the late 1980s, the process of democratization and increased public participation has pressed for the expansion of social welfare in Taiwan, while neoliberalization has affected housing policies to enhance the operation of market mechanisms for housing provision. Nowadays, the Taiwanese state primarily facilitates the growth of housing market and homeownership, exercising little control over speculation. Escalating housing prices have led to a strong social rental housing movement. This chapter explores the diminishing role of the state in Taiwan’s housing system and how housing has been understood by the state, placing the discussions in the political and economic contexts after 1949. The chapter also examines how the social housing movement since 2010 has gradually transformed the role of the state in its provision of housing and what obstacles the movement has to confront.
Yi-Ling Chen
Chapter 3. Displacement by Neoliberalism: Addressing the Housing Crisis of Hong Kong in the Restructuring of Pearl River Delta Region
Abstract
The chapter offers a review of how the planning of housing provision has transformed in post-handover Hong Kong against the rise of China’s influence. Focusing on housing or geographies of housing, this chapter argues that neoliberalism has evolved in Hong Kong as an ongoing process of reshaping the boundary of the city, which demands a normalization of displacement. ‘Displacement’ has been naturalized in a set of policy changes resulting from a hybrid of developmentalism and neoliberalism. In the chapter, the author discusses how displacement has occurred in three senses, yet is embedded in a particular mode of economic growth, and how housing shapes and is shaped by a continuous rearrangement of economics, employment, and cross-border geographies.
Shu-Mei Huang
Chapter 4. When Neoliberalization Meets Clientelism: Housing Policies for Low- and Middle-Income Housing in Bangkok
Abstract
The need of providing concrete solutions to solving housing problems in Thailand led to the establishment of the National Housing Authority in 1973. The role of this public agency was undermined, however, by the government’s financial viability, while the private housing sector came to thrive. The financial liberalization and steady economic growth boosting private sector housing investments in response to greater housing demands of the urbanites may represent neoliberal transformation. This chapter contends that this notion is equivocal. An investigation of two public housing policies for low- and middle-income groups in Bangkok introduced during Thaksin’s regime in the 2000s reveals that housing populism supporting the legitimacy of the ruling political clout mediates Thailand’s housing development between the neoliberal influence and clientelism.
Thammarat Marohabutr
Chapter 5. Neoliberal Urbanism Meets Socialist Modernism: Vietnam’s Post-Reform Housing Policies and the New Urban Zones of Hanoi
Abstract
Since the introduction of the economic reform, Doi Moi, in 1986, Vietnam has been advancing, at least on the surface, into market economy in most social and economic arenas. In the housing sector, while the retreat of the state and fast expansion of new urban exclusive enclaves for the growing middle-class have been taken as signifying evidence of the triumphing neoliberalization, this chapter argues against such an oversimplification. Using data on relevant policies and in-depth case studies of four new urban zones in Hanoi, the chapter examines the complex interaction of the emerging new market imperatives amidst the adaptive socialist legacy, which results in the evolvement of a hybrid system in amalgamating neoliberal urbanism and socialist modernism.
Hoai Anh Tran, Ngai-Ming Yip
Chapter 6. Beyond Property Rights and Displacement: China’s Neoliberal Transformation and Housing Inequalities
Abstract
Based on the empirical findings from the historic inner city of Nanjing, this chapter argues that China’s neoliberal urban housing reform has led to the conflicts associated with property rights and forced displacement, and that it is important to pay attention to the understanding of by-products such as a shortage of public housing in suitable locations and contradictions between pro-homeownership propaganda and the reality of housing as a basic human need. The recent state-led housing provision restructuring under the ‘egalitarian’ banner of ‘indemnification’ or ‘shantytown renovation’ has served to speed up the forced displacement and resettlement of residents without evoking a new wave of social contestations. In this regard, this chapter further argues that it can be restrictive to solely define China’s economic and housing reforms as conforming to developmental capitalism or state-sponsored neoliberalism. It is proposed that a more embracing and evolutionary stance should be employed to gauge the ongoing neoliberal mutations and variegated housing policies.
Zhao Zhang
Chapter 7. Development and Inequality in Urban China: The Privatization of Homeownership and the Transformation of Everyday Practice
Abstract
Whereas the existing literature on housing in urban China primarily focuses on the influence of globalization and the state’s strategies of neoliberalism on the national scale, studies of the individual experience of everyday life reveal the multidirectional character of state, market, and society relationship. This chapter based on an ethnographic study uses interviews and participant observation in Nanjing’s four different apartment complexes—two gated communities and two public housing compounds—to capture the experiences of people in the midst of dramatic changes in urban housing. The findings reveal the emerging social spaces of the middle classes, as they engage with new production and consumption processes of the housing market. Citizens negotiate the changing role of the state in service provision, the deterioration of social life in the neighborhood, and the burden of high housing prices. Dynamic conceptions of ownership, responsibility, and individuality constituted by the commercialized housing market create new practices of everyday life.
Sarah Tynen
Chapter 8. Weaving the Common in the Financialized City: A Case of Urban Cohousing Experience in South Korea
Abstract
This chapter examines an urban housing movement called Bin-Zib [empty house and/or guests’ house] in Seoul, South Korea. Opposed to the ideology of private property ownership associated with housing, residents of Bin-Zib have tried to turn urban housing into a common system. Bin-Zib’s experiment over seven years has shown the possibility of creating a common housing system in a radically autonomous manner without state intervention. Three key findings are highlighted in this chapter. First, without explicitly stated ideologies, rules, or a chain of command, Bin-Zib has cultivated communistic relations in their everyday life. Second, while the community cannot avoid confrontations with neoliberal society and conflicts within itself, Bin-Zib members have expanded the scope of the communing experiment to include a network of homes, a café, and a cooperative bank, by inventing an array of strategies and discourses. Last but not the least, although the concept of ‘cohousing’ was quickly captured and exploited by the government and capital in South Korea, Bin-Zib shows that producing and reproducing the common is essentially an issue of creating new relations.
Didi K. Han
Chapter 9. Contesting Property Hegemony in Asian Cities
Abstract
The chapter attempts to show the dialectical relationships between state violence and the construction of property hegemony, which have enabled the Asian states to pursue the urbanization of capital while ensuring social stability. It draws attention to the rich history of urban contestations Asian economies have witnessed so as to challenge the conventional wisdom that Asia’s economic miracle is maintained by the efficient functioning of the state in the absence of political contestations. The rise of Asian developmental states and the recreation of Party States have been possible because of their need to respond to the socio-political pressure mounted by grassroots politics, including labor struggles and democratization movements. The chapter contends that acknowledging the rich history of urban contestations would further facilitate the construction of progressive urban futures by perceiving cities as ‘commonwealth.’
Hyun Bang Shin
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia
Editors
Yi-Ling Chen
Hyun Bang Shin
Copyright Year
2019
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-55015-6
Print ISBN
978-1-137-51750-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55015-6

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