Abstract:
Since the 1990s, the content of urban redevelopment has been sharply
transformed and including vibrant elements from economic to cultural, historic,
social, and environmental considerations, which is termed as the transformation
from bulldozed reconstruction to sustainable regeneration. In addition, the
agencies involving in the process of redevelopment have been broadened and
blurred the boundary between public and private sectors. With the rise of
intercity competition, the public-private-partnership (PPP) has taken as the
modus operandi to implement the governing capacity of entrepreneurial city and
the foundation to achieve successful redevelopment appealing to private actors
– not only businessmen, developers and, financiers but also NGOs, tourists, and
talents. The paper argues that the logic of urban regeneration is often propertyled
and requires non-economic elements (e.g. culture, creativity, history, green,
and water) enlarging the niche of property market in that they can help upgrade
the added values of property-led regeneration. Meanwhile, non-economic
elements are functioned as a new institutional fix to alleviate the internal
contradictions of entrepreneurial governance in general and property-led
regeneration in particular to legitimize the pro-business agenda behind the
mechanism. We take Taipei and Hong Kong as the cases to illuminate the
argument. Both cities have undergone the heavy burden of living due to the
fancy property speculation since 1990s and face the contestations from
grassroots level for community livability. We particularly focus on two policies –
the Urban Regeneration Station (URS) in West Taipei and Revitalization of
Industrial Buildings (RIB) in East Hong Kong to explore how the property-led
ideology has embedded in the experiments of historical revitalization and what
are the problems these policies have encountered.
