Social governance for value creation: state-led land assembly, the property mind, and speculative urbanism in Taiwan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Focusing on Taiwan's state-led, compulsory land assembly scheme (called Zonal Expropriation), we examine how the increasingly entrepreneurial state has deployed it to create land value while socially governing challenges to speculative urbanism. We argue that any development schemes that claim a priori creation of value must in fact socially construct that value in practice. Building on a case study called Central North, we show that zonal expropriation works to actively cultivate a calculating property mind(set) among affected landowners to institutionally entice participation in land taking. The article generates three important conclusions: (1) value creation is predicated on the state's taking and planning powers but not on market mechanisms alone, (2) state-led land assembly schemes, such as Central North, lock the city's urban economy in the real estate market's logic and trajectory, (3) land value creation and social governance of land conflicts have become more co-constitutive and should be relationally examined.