A catallactic framework of government land reclamation: The case of Hong Kong and Shenzhen

This paper describes three models of state planning for land reclamation and advances a fourth in the form of a modified neo-institutional economic theory of urban rent dissipation by Steven Cheung (1974) to interpret state-led reclamations as a way to break the control of land by land oligarchs. By comparing the concepts of new towns and other strategic reclamations in Hong Kong (HK) and the urban expansion of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SSEZ), this paper illustrates how the idiosyncratic forces of the land market drive the state to seek ways to create land through reclamation to achieve its planning goals. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.