Increased automobile ownership and use in China over the last two decades has increased energy consumption, worsened air pollution, and exacerbated congestion. However, the countrywide growth in car ownership conceals great variation among cities. For example, Shanghai and Beijing each had about 2 million motor vehicles in 2004, but by 2010, Beijing had 4.8 million motor vehicles whereas Shanghai had only 3.1 million. Among the factors contributing to this divergence is Shanghai’s vehicle control policy, which uses monthly license auctions to limit the number of new cars.

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.

Explains the collective purpose of this special issue: to provide empirical case studies of when there have been relatively equitable outcomes in land disputes under Asian authoritarian regimes. Comparative analysis indicates that inter-governmental politics and social narrative processes deserve further study.

Planning aspires to intervene and make positive change. However, our ideas about how to create institutional reform need to be revisited because they do not fully account for the changes we have witnessed. This article assesses the state of our knowledge about institutions, and of how we construct and change them. It identifies the major deficiencies in new institutionalism in planning theory and searches for how to influence positive institutional change.

Ordinary North Korean citizens have been coping with economic hardship by eking out livelihoods for themselves. Grassroots markets and local petty economies have become commonplace.

Around the globe, streets and sidewalks in cities are being contested as spaces that should be used for more than transportation. This article challenges our understanding of both property rights and public space by applying a property rights framework to situate sidewalk use debates. It analyzes and maps the sidewalk property regimes of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam through a novel integration of surveying and ethnography. The case illuminates the feasibility of a mixed-use sidewalk that can be shared between various kinds of uses and users.