Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Regional Planning, General, Social Science, Sociology, Poverty & Homelessness
ISBN: 9781447313472
Google: rd16BgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23258518
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2015-01-26T09:37:00+00:00

Promoting private interest by public hands? The gentrification of public lands by housing policies in Taipei City

Liling Huang

Introduction

In the West, the discussion about gentrification to date has mainly referred to how certain social classes were replaced by others due to changes in the spatial economy and public policies (see Lees et al, 2008). Increasingly, it has focused on how private developers partner with government bodies, especially in the provision of urban infrastructures, to mobilise the process of gentrification. The mechanisms that Western governments employ in redevelopment mostly rely on financial, planning and legal tools. By way of comparison, to date, the role of public lands and their influence on gentrification has been much less significant.1 In Taipei, however, processes of gentrification seem to be different. Due to the legacy of Japanese colonial rule and the authoritarian regime after the Second World War, central and local governments own more than 40% of the urban land in Taipei. Because a high percentage of the public lands are located in the city center and in strategic areas, in recent decades, the development of public lands has played an important role in the gentrification of Taipei.

This chapter reviews the development of public lands in Taipei and its impact on the urban gentrification of the city center. I focus on two issues. The first is the commodification of public housing in the 1980s. From the mid-1970s to the 1980s, central government built a block of public housing in the city center that was not for permanent rental and could be sold after a certain number of years, normally five years. Due to the colonial legacy and the later role of public lands in the city, these public housing developments in central Taipei were mostly for military dependants and the rising new middle class. The national and local governments collaborated in the provision of military lands with good planning and design, sound infrastructures, and good locations; as such, many public housing units became an upscale commodity in the real estate market and pushed up housing prices in the surrounding areas. Second, over the past decade, the relationship between public housing and gentrification in Taipei has ascended to another stage. The deregulation of public lands and housing under the Urban Renewal Act (URA) inaugurated in 1998, in conjunction with the power of private capital, has turned public land and housing in good central city locations into enclaves for the super-rich and elite professionals, and created a phenomenon similar to the ‘super-gentrification’ in first-tier global cities such as New York or London that Lees (2003; see also Butler and Lees, 2006) has conceptualised. However, in Taipei, it is not super-gentrifiers that are gentrifying, but rather the government itself, in that it is privatising public lands, making them ripe for urban redevelopment. Taipei, then, presents a somewhat unique case of gentrification.

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