This book examines the “ethics in relation to city and urbanism” by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East–West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance. This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating political theory, ethics, urban studies, public policy, making applications of ethics and political philosophy to social sciences to examine controversial urban issues in the Hong Kong context. It challenges the general conception that philosophy and ethics are detached from everyday life, with the philosophers engaging mainly in abstract intellectual pursuit and some of them even disdaining “pedestrian” applications of abstract thinking. This book makes applications of ethics and political philosophy to real-life urban contexts in Hong Kong, thereby trying to highlight the normative in order to throw new light to the general approach and strategy to deal with practical urban issues, facilitating “out-of-the-box” thinking in the field of housing and urban studies, stimulating scholars, researchers, and students in the fields, urban planners, urban managers, and other professionals as well as urban policy-makers.

Constructs an original dialogue between constitutional law, film, and identity by using Hong Kong as a case study.

This book discusses land and housing controversies in Hong Kong, which offer a point of reference for the comparison and analysis of similar or contrasting cases overseas from the perspective of social values. It enhances readers’ understanding of the social values, philosophical and theoretical issues that underpin land and housing controversies, as well as their policy implications. The discussion in each chapter goes beyond mere substantive and contextual analysis, and is explicitly positioned and theorized within the broader context of social values, with a theoretical and philosophical framework for assessing the issue concerned. The book is interdisciplinary in nature, with each chapter integrating two or more disciplines to examine various controversial land and housing issues.

This collection of selected works by Professor Albert H.Y. Chen shows the contours of the author’s scholarship as it developed over 35 years of his academic career, from 1984 to the present. The essays are divided into three sections which cover the three major domains of Professor Chen’s research. Part I covers the legal developments and controversies of “One Country, Two Systems” since the Hong Kong interpretation on “the right of abode” in 1999 to the anti-extradition movement of 2019. Part II shifts to focus on tradition and modernity in Chinese Law, including China’s Confucian and Legalist traditions and how the socialist legal system in China evolved and modernized in the era of “reform and opening”. Part III examines the transplantation of Western thinking and constitutionalism to East Asia in modern times and discusses the achievements and failures of these efforts. In conjunction with an introductory chapter that sets out the basic orientation and paradigm of these legal and constitutional studies and an epilogue that reflects on the main themes, this collection exemplifies the author’s important contributions to the field and provides insight into how the legal orders in Hong Kong and mainland China have changed over the course of Professor Chen’s academic career.

After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informal’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave ‘villages in the city’ and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants’ livelihoods and living places. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the ‘villages in the city’; in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.

This volume introduces the notion of ‘relational planning’ through a collection of theoretical and empirical contributions that explore the making of heterogeneous associations in the planning practice. The analytical concept builds on recent approaches to complexity and materiality in planning theory by drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) of urban issues. It frames planning as a socio-material practice taking place within the multifaceted relations between artefacts, agency and practices. By way of this triad, spatial planning is not studied as a given, linear or technical process but rather problematized as a hybrid, distributed and situational practice. The inquiries in this collection thus describe how planning practices are negotiated and enacted in and beyond formal arenas and procedures of planning, and so make visible the many sites, actors and means of spatial planning. Addressing planning topics such as ecology, preservation, participation, rebuilding and zoning, this volume takes into account the uncertain world planning is embedded in. The implications of such a perspective are considered in light of how planning is performed and how it contributes to the emergence of specific socio-material forms and interactions. This is an invaluable read for all scholars of STS, Ecology, Architecture and Urban Planning.