Speaker
Description
This article explores the social impacts of public housing redevelopment through how its outcomes reshape public tenants’ experiences of citizenship in Hong Kong. As the outcome of the redevelopment, public tenants’ habitats are transformed by demolishing old structures of buildings and neighbourhood layouts and then building new ones; in some cases, residents’ composition is also changed to integrate blends of public and private tenures under the rubric of ‘public-private partnership’ to redevelop ageing estates of pure public tenures (August, 2016; Tach, 2009; Ziersch and Arthurson, 2007). In many cases, these activities are led by the state, the public housing provider, while public tenants have limited decision-making rights about their neighbourhood. Such power relations result from the existing regime of property rights, where landlords play a role in decisions about the land while those who inhabit the area without ownership do not (Purcell, 2014). This article aims to understand the impacts of public housing redevelopment on public tenants’ experiences of citizenship. Based on this research aim, we develop our main research question, ‘How does public housing redevelopment shape public tenants’ experiences of citizenship?’ and two sub-questions: 1) what outcomes of public housing redevelopment are perceived by public tenants? 2) how does public housing redevelopment affect public tenants’ experience of citizenship? We focus on the lived experiences of public tenants living in redeveloped public estates to understand the role of redevelopment as a planning tool in transforming residents’ perceptions of their relations with the state in a specific local context. The case of Hong Kong offers a typical example of the state-managed housing system (Lau, 2007). As a property state global city with scarce land, the Hong Kong government places real estate in a vital role in the functioning of the whole economy (Haila, 2000), which is described as a property-led economy (Chui, 2001). At the same time, Hong Kong is well known for its large-scale public housing programme. With a 40-year history of constructing high-rise buildings to house low-income households (Peng and Maing, 2021), the Hong Kong government has been working on redeveloping its ageing public housing estates since the 1980s (The HKSAR Government, 2023). Although the demolition of old buildings and relocation of residents attract great public attention in Hong Kong, relatively little research has been published on the social impacts of this state-led redevelopment. Through in-depth and semi-structured interviews in Hong Kong, we have one-to-one discussions with 26 public tenants living in public housing estates as redevelopment outcomes. This analysis reveals that 1) redevelopment contributes to having a positive impact on public tenants’ perceptions of how others see them and an equal society by narrowing the material gap in housing between the poor and the rich; 2) it has limited impacts on changing public tenants’ sense of their position in society, which is determined by the housing system, the sense of responsibility of public officials, and political context. Based on empirical findings, this article reflects on whether neighbourhood planning could improve low-income groups’ position in society to add a new perspective to the debate about the desirability and feasibility of planning. At the end of the article, we devise four practical policy accommodations at both the neighbourhood and city scales.
References
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Chui, E., 2001. Doomed Elderly People in a Booming City: Urban Redevelopment and Housing Problems of Elderly People in Hong Kong. Housing, Theory and Society 18, 158–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036090152770528
Haila, A., 2000. Real Estate in Global Cities: Singapore and Hong Kong as Property States. Urban Studies 37, 2241–2256. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980020002797
Lau, K.Y., 2007. The State-managed Housing System in Hong Kong, in: Housing and the New Welfare State. Routledge.
Peng, S., Maing, M., 2021. Influential factors of age-friendly neighborhood open space under high-density high-rise housing context in hot weather: A case study of public housing in Hong Kong. Cities 115, 103231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103231
Purcell, M., 2014. Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City. Journal of Urban Affairs 36, 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/juaf.12034
Tach, L., 2009. More than bricks and mortar: Neighborhood frames, social processes, and the mixed-income redevelopment of a public housing project. City and Community 8, 269–299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6040.2009.01289.x
Ziersch, A., Arthurson, K., 2007. Social capital and housing tenure in an adelaide neighbourhood. Urban Policy and Research 25, 409–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/08111140701665831
| Keywords | public housing redevelopment; social impacts; public tenants; experiences of citizenship |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
