Planning by contract : a property rights analysis of coastal land reclamation by the private sector in Hong Kong from 1841 to 2021

Abstract

This thesis makes an original attempt to research reclamation for urban development by: (a) examining the contribution of reclamation by contract (mutual consent) to land development; and (b) scrutinising a market failure conjecture using publicly-available and verifiable data from government reports, as well as Crown (Government) Leases and their associated Conditions of Sale/Grant/Exchange, and Government Gazette notices, which information was incompletely reported in government reports and, thus, unknown to previous researchers. The extant literature presents a general picture of reclamations undertaken by private landowners, but rarely deals with the institutional arrangements behind them. This thesis uses the terms of land grant contract called Conditions of Sale/Grant/Exchange which are incorporated in the individual Crown Leases, which define the contractual arrangements of reclamation, to arrive at a better understanding of the planning and control of private reclamations, which most researchers have ignored. The literature review in Chapter II shows that two groups of political and economic studies subscribe to the following conjecture: only the state can bring about a sufficient number of successful reclamations to produce new land for development and this can be seen as a form of market failure correction by supplying reclamation as a public good. The first group (Ng 1993; 1999; 2006; Ng and Cook 1997) considered the Hong Kong Government a landlord with a monopoly over reclaimed land. The second group (Ng 2010; 2011; Glaser, Haberzettl, and Walsh 1991; Choi 2014) found all reclamations involving the private sector as planners-developers to be undesirable. The literature review, by referencing the existence of reclamation by leasehold lot owners in Hong Kong, dismisses this conjecture because another group of studies (Lai, Davies, and Lorne 2016; Lai & Davies 2017) has shown that reclamation can be and has been conducted through planning by contract. To assess the extent and institutional arrangements of private reclamation, this thesis examines the collected, publicly-available official data on all reclamations (public and private) in Hong Kong from government reports – notably its Annual Reports, land sale notices, and notices under the Foreshores and Sea Bed Ordinance and the Foreshore and Sea-bed (Reclamations) Ordinance in the Government Gazettes – in Chapter III. The findings show that reclamations carried out by Crown (Government) lessees have almost never been discontinued from 1864 onwards. The lessees funded and undertook reclamations under government supervision. Besides being confined within the lot boundaries delineated by the government in the Crown (Government) Leases, the reclamations were spatially coordinated with adjacent lots and/or government land by conditions such as aligning with public roads or seawalls. While the Crown Leases, before the enactment of the Foreshores and Sea Bed Ordinance, were unrestricted as regards their land uses, the post-war Crown (Government) Leases were all for specific uses such as electricity generation, oil storage, shipbuilding, container terminal operations, and housing. In Chapter IV, the analysis of the reclamations by lot owners in Hong Kong shows no market failure in the reclaimed land supply. The chapter also identifies two more ways of involvement by the private sector in reclamation: (a) government-financed private reclamation and (b) private sector-financed reclamation by the government for both public and private uses.