The property rights approach to urban development has recently been proposed in the planning literature to explain how urban systems self-organize spatially and institutionally. The land-tenure system is one of the key factors affecting land use and thus urban development. It is not clear, however, how such a factor affects the process of urban development. This research aims to provide reasonable explanations as to how the land-tenure system in China in general affects urban development, by building game-theoretic models which include plans as a manifestation of information and property rights as a manifestation of land-use rights. Viewing regulated development as a collective good, the model is based on the prisoner's dilemma game, where the local government regulates and the developer makes development decisions. Preliminary results show that land rights in the transitional economy of China are of paramount importance and must be clearly specified in order to make the land development process efficient at reducing transaction costs.

Property-led renewal has become the mainstream approach of entrepreneurial governance but may change the sociospatial pattern of the classical rent gap and cause problems such as neighborhood commodification, overlooked public interest, and uneven development. Considering the extensive application of marketized measures such as the floor-area-bonus and right transformation in Taipei’s urban renewal system, we explore the role of the state in rent gap production and the obstacles to realizing sustainable regeneration. The legislative framework indicates that urban renewal in Taipei has prompted growth network among property market, property-led incentive, and stakeholders to exploit the state-induced rent gap. From the micro-level, we select two cases in the old and new districts in Taipei for comparison and find that the sociospatial unevenness has not been balanced but intensified by the property-led renewal since the 2000s. Profit-making has engendered a governing barrier detrimental to implementing sustainable regeneration while distorting the publicity to property appreciation.

The regime theory has been widely applied to analyze the governing capacity for urban community development. However, it has seldom been translated to the countryside, even though rural communities often reveal some potential for self-governance and a capacity to act. With the emergence of information technology, social network services have become popular and have changed the social interactions between the public and private sectors. By considering the rural case of river conservation in New Taipei City, this paper used the regime theory to investigate the governing capacity of rural collaborative networks and the influence of social network services on coordination. We found that the regime theory can be used to explore rural communities with strong collaborative networks and local identities. The adoption of communication tools based on social network services strengthens informal public-private coordination wherein the power geometry of rural regimes is upgraded from ‘power-to’ to ‘power-amidst’, thus, advancing the solidarity of the community networks and prompting the rise of vital coalitions and the governing capacity of rural actors.

This study proposes a framework of multilevel governing networks to analyse issues of multiple-use common-pool resource management in a complex socio-ecological system. By exploring the case study of the Golden Corridor Program in Yunlin, Taiwan, we found that self-governance at the community level is a partial way to govern multiple-use common-pool resources. Farmland here is facing the impact of land subsidence, and the high-speed rail construction has overweighted the surface. Although the Golden Corridor Program attempts to mitigate this effect of land subsidence on rail traffic safety through rewards for water-saving farming activities for farmers, the implementation lacks the intensive vertical integration and horizontal connections required to promote the collaborative platform among stakeholders. Local farmers still care about agricultural revenue. Thus, the loose self-governing capacity cannot generate institutional collective actions to improve the agri-environment here. The premature multilevel governing network has caused the governance failure to regulate this multiple-use common-pool resource.