This book provides critical insight into the experience of multi-owned property, and showcases different cultural responses across the Asia-Pacific region. Escalating demand for properties within global cities has created exuberance around apartment living; however less well understood are the restrictions on individual rights and responsibilities associated with collective living. In contrast to the highly populated and traditional communal housing arrangements of past Asian economies, we see an increasing focus on neo-liberalist, market-based policies associated with the rise of an Asian middle class shaping structural change from communal to individualistic. This edited collection unpacks the rights, restrictions and responsibilities of multi-owned property ownership across the Asia-Pacific region; examining the experiences of developers, strata-managers, owners and residents. In doing so, they highlight how the rights of one party affects the restrictions and responsibilities of others within different policy frameworks. This work will reach an interdisciplinary audience including scholars and practitioners of sociology, public policy, urban studies and planning, economics, property management and architecture.

This book examines condominium, property, governance, and law in international and conceptual perspective and reveals this urban realm as complex and mutating. Condominiums are proliferating the world over and transforming the socio-spatial organization of cities and residential life. The collection assembles arguably the most prominent scholars in the world currently working in this broad area and situated in multiple disciplines, including legal and socio-legal studies, political science, public administration, and sociology. Their analyses span condominium governance and law on five continents and in nine countries: the United States (US), China, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, South Africa, Israel, Denmark, and Spain. Neglected issues and emerging trends related to condominium governance and law in cities from Tel Aviv to Chicago to Melbourne are discerned and analysed. The book pursues fresh empirical inquiries and cogent conceptual engagements regarding how condominiums are governed through law and other means. It includes accounts of a wide range of governance difficulties including chronic anti-social owner behaviour, short-term rentals, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they are being dealt with. By uncovering crucial cross-national commonalities, the book reveals the global urban context of condominium governance and law as empirically rich and conceptually fruitful. The book will appeal to researchers and students in socio-legal studies, law, sociology, political science, urban studies, and public administration as well as journalists, social activists, policymakers, and condo owners/board members.

This book, the first comprehensive overview of housing policy in Australia in 25 years, investigates the many dimensions of housing affordability and government actions that affect affordability outcomes. It analyses the causes and implications of declining home ownership, rising rates of rental stress and the neglect of social housing, as well as the housing situation of Indigenous Australians. The book covers a period where housing policy primarily operated under a neo-liberal paradigm dominated by financial de-regulation and fiscal austerity. It critiques the broad and fragmented range of government measures that have influenced housing outcomes over this period. These include regulation, planning and tax policies as well as explicit housing programs. The book also identifies current and future housing challenges for Australian governments, recognizing these as a complex set of inter-connected problems. Drawing on its coverage of the economics, politics and administration of housing provision, the book sets out priorities for the transformational national strategy needed for a fairer and more productive housing system, and to improve affordability outcomes for the most vulnerable Australians.

This book captures concepts and projects that reshape the discipline of architecture by prioritizing people over buildings. In doing so, it uncovers sophisticated approaches that go beyond standard architectural protocols to explore experience-based aesthetics, encounters, action-based research, critical practices, and social engagement. If these are widely understood as singular or incompatible approaches, the book reveals that they form a growing network of interrelations and generate levels of flexibility and dynamism that are reshaping the discipline. The thirteen chapters analyze thought-provoking projects – branded museums, restaged exhibitions, home/work spaces, multi-cultural spaces, ageing apartment blocks, abandoned homes, and urban slums amongst them. Together, they enliven the stalled debate about a single architectural response to the complex challenges of the contemporary world by highlighting pluralistic perspectives on architecture that offer fresh solutions on how architecture can improve people’s lives. Featuring essays from an international range of authors, this book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the wider conditions under which, and in relation to which, contemporary architecture is produced.

This book is highly topical. The shift from the multilateral WTO negotiations to bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements has been going on for some time, but it is bound to accelerate after the WTO Doha round of negotiations is now widely regarded as a failure. However, there is a particular regional angle to this topic as well. After concluding that further progress in the Doha round was unlikely, Pacific Rim nations recently have progressed with the negotiations of a greatly expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement that includes industrialised economies and developed countries such as the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies such as Singapore, but also several developing countries in Asia and Latin America such as Malaysia and Vietnam. US and EU led efforts to conclude FTAs with Asia-Pacific nations are also bound to accelerate again, after a temporary slowdown in the negotiations following the change of government in the United States and the expiry of the US President’s fast-track negotiation authority. The book will provide an assessment of these dynamics in the world’s fastest growing region. It will look at the IP chapters from a legal perspective, but also put the developments into a socio-economic and political context. Many agreements in fact are concluded because of this context rather than for purely economic reasons or to achieve progress in fields like IP law. The structure of the book follows an outline that groups countries into interest alliances according to their respective IP priorities. This ranges from the driving forces of the EU, US and Japan, via Asia-Pacific resource-rich but IP poor economies such as Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies with strong IP systems such as Singapore and Korea to leading developing countries such as China and India and ‘second tier industrializing economies’ such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

The majority of people now live in cities and for many that means apartment living. Apartments are where we spend our time, make our homes, raise our families and invest our money. Apartment living requires that we try to get along with our neighbours and make decisions collectively about the management of our buildings. This book examines how different housing markets, development practices, planning regimes, legal structures and social and cultural norms affect people’s everyday experiences of apartment living.

Available online via SciVerse ScienceDirect, or in print for a limited time only, The International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, Seven Volume Set is the first international reference work for housing scholars and professionals, that uses studies in economics and finance, psychology, social policy, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, law, and other disciplines to create an international portrait of housing in all its facets: from meanings of home at the microscale, to impacts on macro-economy. This comprehensive work is edited by distinguished housing expert Susan J. Smith, together with Marja Elsinga, Ong Seow Eng, Lorna Fox O'Mahony and Susan Wachter, and a multi-disciplinary editorial team of 20 world-class scholars in all. Working at the cutting edge of their subject, liaising with an expert editorial advisory board, and engaging with policy-makers and professionals, the editors have worked for almost five years to secure the quality, reach, relevance and coherence of this work. A broad and inclusive table of contents signals (or tesitifes to) detailed investigation of historical and theoretical material as well as in-depth analysis of current issues. This seven-volume set contains over 500 entries, listed alphabetically, but grouped into seven thematic sections including methods and approaches; economics and finance; environments; home and homelessness; institutions; policy; and welfare and well-being. Housing professionals, both academics and practitioners, will find The International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home useful for teaching, discovery, and research needs. International in scope, engaging with trends in every world region The editorial board and contributors are drawn from a wide constituency, collating expertise from academics, policy makers, professionals and practitioners, and from every key center for housing research Every entry stands alone on its merits and is accessed alphabetically, yet each is fully cross-referenced, and attached to one of seven thematic categories whose ‘wholes' far exceed the sum of their parts