AAG Los Angeles, April 2013
Call for paper: Defining the Housing Question in East Asia’s post-crisis housing boom
In East Asia, the housing boom is a story in present tense. In the survey on the hottest housing market by 5-year housing price growth, 4 out of the top 10 countries are from East Asia. China tops with 110.9 per cent growth, followed by Hong Kong with 93.7 percent, Singapore with 50.5 per cent, and Taiwan with 30.1 per cent. The global great recession has not slowed down the ascendancy of property prices, many of which have been bubbling up to new heights in a repeat performance of the very property bubbles that caused the global financial crisis in the first place. Rising housing price is only one aspect of the broader economic bubble in East Asia. Governmental responses to the housing bubble, very often, are either confined within financial strategies, like restricting foreigners’ access to housing markets; or shadowed by programs stimulating economic growth in the global recession. Such is the case of China’s $586 billion economic stimulus program, which has led to another round of overbuilding, overheating and inflation.
The global financial crisis of 2008-2009 pushed housing issues to the forefront of critical studies of capitalist forms of urbanization. The subprime crisis immediately following the mid-2000s housing bubbles in the US revealed the unreliability of the self-regulated market model legitimized by neoliberal economists. Furthermore, the loss of confidence was reflected not only in financial indices, but also in widened inequality in housing landscapes in various forms, such as gentrification, gated communities, enclaves, slum developments and squatting, etc. The housing question, firstly raised by Frederick Engles, has been revisited by scholars like David Harvey and Peter Marcuse for the right to the city - a right to change ourselves by changing the city. For them, the housing question is never about housing per se, but about the broader capitalist forms of urbanization, which is reshaped by, and in return shapes, changing balances of social forces and political-institutional arrangements.
While housing prices soar in a similar manner as that in the U.S. in 1996-2006, the socio-cultural and political contexts of Asian countries differ in many aspects. For instance, the sector of public housing still occupies a sizable share due to the logic of developmentalism; house ownership is more envisaged as a social project derived from Confucian value; gentrification frequently occurs in an en-bloc manner through new-built developments, and so on. In this situation, we would like to collect papers regarding the housing question in the context of East Asia’s post-crisis housing booming, especially in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
Papers are invited to form a comparative picture of East Asia’s housing issues, with the purpose of generating substantial academic commentary on, and analysis of, the causes and consequences of the housing booms in East Asia and their variants across the region.
Potential topics/themes of interest might include, but are not limited to:
1. State policy and housing boom
2. Homeownership, the financial architecture and culture
3. Housing market and speculation
4. Ethnic Chinese capital and real estate business
5. The commodification of public housing in different contexts and social justice
6. Inequality in housing landscapes
Expressions of interest from potential contributors should be sent to Dr. Yi-Ling Chen ([log in to unmask]) (University of Wyoming) and Dr. Jun Wang ([log in to unmask]) (Hong Kong Baptist University) in the form of a 250 word abstract by 01 October 2012.
Successful submissions will be contacted by the 15th October 2012 and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by 24th October 2012. Please note a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid before the submission of abstracts.
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