The Institutional Fix of Historic Revitalization behind Property-led Urban Regeneration: the Comparison between Taipei and Hong Kong

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.