Making Public Inquiries
How Do Two Public Policies Help the City Cash in on Land and Air—and Assign Our Future to Speculative Urbanism Along the Way?
Everywhere we look, intensified land development and worsening housing affordability seem to be the dominant features of our present and future life in the city. In the northern metropolitan region in Taiwan, housing affordability has deteriorated, and fast. In 2002, in Taipei City and New Taipei City, the housing price to household income ratio, a measure of housing affordability, was slightly above six in both cities. By 2020, it had deteriorated to 14.85 for the former and 11.86 for the latter. Meanwhile, between 2012 to 2020, land prices increased 14.28% in Taipei City and 26.52% in New Taipei City, meaning housing affordability has worsened much more. Despite the rising land and housing prices, local authorities have continued to churn up new plans, development zones, and apartment buildings. But they are all more of the same—luxury high-rises whose prices top whatever came before them.
With an eye toward a more socially just urban future, our scholarly and civil engagement work, individually and collectively, has investigated the relationship between planning, public policy, and the politics of land development. This webpage draws from this line of ongoing endeavors and focuses on two public policies—Zonal Expropriation and Density Bonusing. We unpack their technical and regulatory workings and tease out how they shape the relationships between people and land, public and private, present and future, and rich and poor. Our goal is to mobilize public inquiries in order to facilitate a politics of land that is more just and equitable.
An Urban Studies Foundation Knowledge Mobilization grant supported the creation of this webpage as well as three virtual public forums on land and social value on July 30 and 31, 2022.
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