City building in the East and West - United States, Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore compared

Cities do not differ only in their planning systems and patterns of land ownership, but also as to the mode of intervention in the property market. The social philosophers in the nineteenth century regarded property rights reform as crucial for building better societies. Town planners a century later, in the age of the omnipresent and omniscient welfare state, regarded town planning as the method by which to build good cities. The liberal and global era at the end of the millennium discovered the third alternative: property development, In this paper I will discuss these three forces of city building (planning system, ownership pattern and intervention in the property market), and compare four different modes of arranging them. These four modes are boosterism in the United States, town planning in Europe, public land ownership as a budgetary mechanism in Hong Kong and intervention in the property market in Singapore. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.