Most of the contemporary literature on the neighbourhood comes from US or European sources where there are sharp contrasts with East Asian cities in terms of the physical form, residential densities and in relation to ideas of community and kinship. This paper reports on a study carried out in Hong Kong which was designed to explore the extent to which western preoccupations with neighbourhood resonate in a high rise, high density Chinese city. As a precursor to a larger scale study interviews were carried out with fifteen individuals in three contrasting locations: a New Town estate, an older, inner city area and a middle class housing estate. The interviews explored inter alia neighbourhood perceptions, ideas of community, sense of belonging and sense of place among contemporary Hong Kong residents.When Yuan Ssu became Confucius' steward he was given nine hundred measures of grain, which he declined. The Master said, 'Can you not find a use for it in helping the people in your neighbourhood?' (The Analects, Book VI).

This paper draws on on-going work on Hong Kong's socio-spatial structure to explore the extent to which it fits the dominant image of the global city. While there is a considerable literature on Hong Kong's changing social structure, there is relatively little on the spatial dimensions of social difference and division. The paper situates the available commentaries and analyses of Hong Kong's income, class and employment structure within the global cities debates. It then analyses census data at the tertiary planning unit level (TPU) to explore the spatial dimensions of social distance in Hong Kong. The conclusion focuses on the distinctive mediations which have shaped the socio-spatial structure of the territory. The integrative role of public housing is argued to be of particular importance in this context.

The developmentalist state in South East Asia has played an important role in guiding and promoting economic growth. Although an implicit theme of much of the discourse is the role of the state in controlling the factors of production, this is not located within the decommodification/commodification debate. Proceeding from the premise that underlies much of economic theory, namely that land values at a time reflect the residual (or surplus) of economic activity that requires land as a factor input, the purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which the Korean state has managed the commodification of urban development and the distributional effects of this process. In spite of private land ownership the state has had a major impact on the processes by which land has become commodified, using extensive land expropriation and land-use planning powers. The Korean state used different strategies to manage trends to commodification at different times: land readjustment projects were used from the 1950s to the 1970s and Public Management Development projects were the main mechanism of urban development from the 1980s. The urban development system was feasible because of the state's extensive control over access to housing finance (decommodified money). In the mid-1990s there was a shift towards greater private sector involvement in urban development. The distributional effects of the urban development process have been highly inequitable. Subsidised home ownership for middle-income families has been favoured over provision of public rental housing for low-income families, driven in major part by cash flow considerations of the developmentalist state. Further, the basis of selecting beneficiaries has been very arbitrary. The system has promoted significant land concentration and land speculation particularly by private companies, including the large chaebol (corporations).

The specificity of Hong Kong’s gentrification trajectory reflects its urban morphology, political institutions, and social and economic structure. While continuously renewing itself economically, much of the city’s inner urban area building stock is old and functionally obsolete, whilst nevertheless providing affordable, well-located housing for lower-income and disadvantaged groups and small-scale commercial clusters. Constrained redevelopment is not the result of economic decline but rather of formidable frictions that make land assembly and vacant possession of buildings difficult. Hong Kong’s executive-led, quasi democratic government articulates with the public ownership of land and its management through the leasehold system, and leads inner-city redevelopment through the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) supported by various institutional and statutory arrangements. (Re)development is favoured because it generates significant state revenue from physical and economic intensification of sites. Although gentrification is not an agenda of the URA, it is a significant outcome of its redevelopment activities.

An important trend in housing delivery internationally has been rising rates of home-ownership. In Hong Kong, owner-occupation has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, and this is expected to continue. This paper seeks to account for trends to homeownership in Hong Kong. It is proposed that two principal factors account for rates of home-ownership internationally: the interaction and combined outcome of housing affordability and household preferences-the 'market explanation' for tenure choice; and the 'ontological explanation' of home-ownership as a preferred household tenure choice, which assumes that ownership is the innately preferred tenure form. On face value, Hong Kong presents a relatively persuasive case for the ontological explanation for trends to home-ownership. Yet the ndings of this paper suggest that the decision to buy appears to be systematically explicable by market factors: in the private sector, primarily by investment considerations, namely high returns to residential property investment and favourable user cost of housing capital; and, in the public sector, by a very ne-grained approach to household affordability with publicly assisted homeownership initiatives. Hong Kong demonstrates again how carefully families weigh the bundle of services associated with their tenure options. The government plans to expand home-ownership further, yet there are major systemic implications for such an expansion.