Land Planning, Property Rights and Management of Built Heritage: Some Hong Kong Observations of Colonial Military Buildings | Land Portal

Información del recurso

Date of publication: 
Enero 2022
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
LP-midp002549
Copyright details: 
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article

There has been much confusion in property rights inquiry into real (immovable) property (i.e., land) between open access and common property, and between public property and common property because that is often also open access. This paper argues that the property rights and access control are two distinct dimensions of land resource management. Access control involves the exercise of exclusionary power relevant to the management of the immovable property (property management) for its optimal use. A review of the literature shows that definitions of property management tend to be too narrow but point towards the need to articulate issues within the property rights paradigm. As a contribution to sustainable resource use as a dimension of land planning, this paper points out and discusses the probable sources of the confusion between land property rights and property management. A “Land Property Rights and Management Matrix” (LPRMM) is developed as a theoretical tool for clarifying the confusion and the relationships amongst relevant concepts. The LPRMM is theoretically informed by Barzel’s not entirely correct distinction between legal (de jure) and economic (de facto) rights and enriched by relevant literature on property rights and property management. Practical use of the LPRMM is illustrated by its application to analyze the issues pertaining to the actual resource-use phenomena in colonial military buildings erected on both private and public land in Hong Kong. The results show that heritage buildings on land under public ownership as private property can be neglected or intensively managed. The LPRMM is not only a useful theoretical tool for precisely assessing the actual affairs of resource use but also a practical tool for identifying issues of property management in its widest sense. The LPRMM offered is a proper interpretation of Barzel’s distinction between legal and economic rights and contributes to systematically re-interpreting property management as town planning writ large in terms of de jure property rights and de facto access.

Autores y editores

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Lai, Lawrence W. C.Davies, Stephen N. G.Choy, Lennon H. T.Chau, K. W.

Corporate Author(s): 
Publisher(s): 

MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.

Proveedor de datos

MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.

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