At a recent ceremony of at the Royal Overseas League in London, Professor Eran Ben-Joseph's book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking was nominated for a National Urban Design Award as one of six top books in urban design from 2012.
In their remarks about the book, the judges noted:
Stephen Kennedy (MCP’12) and Alice Shay (MCP’12), co-founders of the
In January, Eran Ben-Joseph took over as the head of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, succeeding Amy Glasmeier who is stepping down after four years in the post to focus on teaching and research.
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This paper proposes a simple, automated method to detect rural to urban land use changes at the pixel level of SPOT-Panchromatic images in the developing world. The proposed method entails two tasks: (1) classification of images as either urban (built-up) or rual (non bult-up) at a relatively high level of spatial detail (pixel level) in order to include the classification of houses made of natural nmaterials. The binary classification was performed through a combined thresholding of spectral information and spatial information derived by a normalized high-pass filter.
While Vietnam’s reforms provided some of the weakest legal private property rights amongst the transition countries, cities like Ho Chi Minh City have booming domestic real estate markets. Interestingly, properties for sale are advertised with a variety of property rights claims. This paper analyzes HCMC’s institutional context and utilizes real estate listings in newspapers from 1998-2001 to employ a hedonic price model to analyze the pattern of prices at which sellers offer properties in Ho Chi Minh City.
Despite a centralized political system, nation-wide legal reforms, and similar high housing demand pressures, property rights have evolved differently in Vietnam’s two leading cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during the transition period. Using ethnographic fieldwork and a hedonic price model, the study shows that the two land and housing markets price tenure ambiguity differently. The different price structures indicate the importance of norms, as socially constructed by local political interests and culture, in the efficacy of land title regularization programs.
Land takings controversies around the globe have been making headline news recently. This article examines the similarities, differences, and ironies between what has been happening in China, Vietnam, and the U.S. Even though these places are different on many levels, their fiscal constraints and land management responses have led to strikingly similar public debates about the very nature of property rights and the legitimacy of local government.
Introduces the collective purpose and significance of the articles in the special issue: to present grounded case studies of relatively equitable outcomes under Asian, authoritarian regimes. Comparative analysis indicates the inter-governmental dynamics and social narratives deserve further study.