Publications

The paper aims to analyse and compare how UK and Singapore deal with compensation with respect to regulation of land (short of a physical taking). The purpose is to determine whether the non-compensation in each jurisdiction is justified. A comparative method using case law, statutes and secondary material across both jurisdictions (as well as some US case law) is adopted. Both the UK and Singapore do not provide compensation when land is affected by regulation, so long as a physical taking has not occurred. Partly because of the abolition of development rights in the UK since 1947, this position may be justified. Conversely, Singapore’s Master Plan seeks a great deal of public reliance and advertises development potential, and non-compensation is not defensible. There is very limited analysis on regulatory effects of land in the UK, and virtually none in Singapore. This would also be the first attempt to compare this aspect of the UK and Singapore’s planning regime.

New South Wales’ (NSW) strata regime has had considerable global influence, inspiring many jurisdictions across and beyond the commonwealth. Both Singapore and British Columbia, Canada have adopted NSW’s strata model. That being said, these jurisdictions have permitted a collective sale by a supermajority of owners for some two decades while NSW only recently enacted legislation allowing for a strata scheme to be redeveloped or collectively sold via a 75% majority. This marks a significant milestone as it departs from the orthodox position requiring unanimity. Given the newness of the legislative amendments, there is no jurisprudential guidance regarding the content of a strata renewal committee’s duty in NSW. Through a comparative analysis of British Columbia and Singapore, this paper suggests how NSW could articulate the duty of care imposed on the strata renewal committee when effecting a collective sale. Being only the second State in Australia to permit strata renewal by a supermajority, the issues raised by the paper may be of some interest in coming years.

We use novel longitudinal data from 19 monthly waves of the Singapore Life Panel to examine the short-term dynamics of the effects health shocks have on household health and non-health spending and income by the elderly. The health shocks we study are the occurrence of new major conditions such as cancer, heart problems, and minor conditions (e.g. diabetes, and hypertension). Our empirical strategy exploits unanticipated changes in health status through the diagnosis of new health conditions, combined with an individual fixed effect framework. We find that major shocks have large and persistent effects while minor shocks have small and mainly contemporaneous effects. We find that household income reduces following a major shock for males but not females. Major health shocks lead to a decrease in households’ non-health expenditures that is particularly pronounced for cancer and stroke sufferers, driven largely by reductions in leisure spending. The financial impact of major shocks on medical saving account balances occur to those without private health insurance, while the impact is on cash balances for privately insured individuals.

The occurrence of in-house unnatural death could negatively affect the value of housing property. This study evaluates the geographic and temporal scope of the impact of unnatural death on property values in Hong Kong. By exploiting the spatial and intertemporal variation of the shock in a difference-in-differences approach, we find significant negative externalities of unnatural death incidence on neighborhood housing values. On average, units in which an unnatural death occurred experience a 25% drop in value following the death. Nearby units on the same floor also show a significant price drop of 4.5%. Prices of units on other floors of the same building decline about 2.6%. Units in other buildings of the same estate observe a price decline of about 1% on average. However, the price for nearby estates within 300 meters shows a positive impact of 0.5%, suggesting a very localized sorting mechanism. Temporally, price evolution after death incidence follows a U shape. Housing prices continue to decline up to 4–5 years after deaths and recover gradually afterwards. We also document the heterogeneity of the impact by the type of death incidence (murder, suicide, or accident) and the type of homebuyers (local buyer, investment firm, and other buyers). We find that the negative externalities of death incidence are largely due to a severe stigma effect, rather than channels through the revealed crime risk or the price contagion effect.

This paper studies the extent to which equilibrium auction prices are pushed up sequentially due to strategic bidding behaviors in government land auction sales. Using a unique dataset that covers the universe of tendering prices submitted by all developers for all residential land auction sales in Singapore, we find that a tenderer’s bids are significantly higher where there was a previous land parcel sold within two years and located within four kilometers. The elevated price margin decreases with time and geographic distance. Tracking sequential bids submitted by same developers over time, we find that the incumbent winner of a previous auction often participates in subsequent nearby land sales but does not necessarily win the sites. We argue that the incumbent deliberately bids up the subsequent land prices to gain pricing advantages to their own parcels.

Around the world, smart technologies are being embraced as a cost-efficient means of enabling the elderly to be cared for in new, more non-proximate ways. They can facilitate ageing-in-place, and have the potential to relieve pressure on the providers of care. Yet, the fact is that the interface of technology and society is a negotiated one. These negotiations are most acutely felt when technology is used to supplement the hitherto human-centred process of caregiving, especially amongst “marginalised” societal cohorts, like the elderly. With this, there is a need to better understand the ways in which smart eldercare technologies are used, misused, or not used by those that they are designed to benefit. Drawing on qualitative data derived from triallists of three smart eldercare technologies in Singapore, this paper explores how the lived experience of smart eldercare can cause agentic and apathetic behaviours towards technology to manifest. Specifically, we identify four expectations – of understanding, response, compliance and appreciation – that undermine the potential beneficence of smart eldercare. To conclude, we emphasise the need for more collaborative, and more contextually-sensitive, approaches to the design, development and implementation of smart eldercare solutions.

In this article, we survey a growing body of literature within geography and other intersecting fields that trains attention on what inclusive smart cities are, or what they could be. In doing so, we build on debates around smart citizens, smart public participation, and grassroots and bottom-up smart cities that are concerned with making smart cities more inclusive. The growing critical scholarship on such dis- courses, however, alerts us to the knowledge politics that are involved in, and the urban inequalities that are deeply rooted within, the urban. Technological interventions con- tribute to these politics and inequalities in various ways. Accordingly, we discuss limitations of the current discourses around inclusive smart cities and suggest a need for a nuanced definition of ‘inclusiveness’. We also discuss the necessity to further engage with critical data studies in order to ‘know’ what we are critiquing.

Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, in doing so, interrogates the tension between ideology and praxis, efficiency and control, access and choice, and smart governance and smart citizenship. It also demonstrates how such tensions are (re)produced through ‘fourthspace’ – the digitally enabled spaces of urbanism that are co-created, and that contribute to an expansion and diffusion of social and political responsibility. It ends by suggesting how such spaces have the potential to radically transform not just the urban environment, but also the role of government and citizens in designing urban futures.

This paper examines the extent to which a change in the cost of car ownership affects the house price gradient with respect to distance from the central business district (CBD). Theory suggests that if the cost of car ownership increases, then people will shift towards other modes of transportation, thus reducing house prices farther away from the CBD. However, the cost of car ownership is likely to be endogenous and correlated with various unobserved factors that also contribute to a change in the house price gradient. To obtain causal effects, we exploit a unique feature of Singapore’s car registration process. All cars in Singapore must have a Certificate of Entitlement (COE), but the number available is restricted based on the traffic concerns of the government and are allocated through a competitive bidding process. We use the number of COEs available each quarter as an instrument for the price of a COE, as the quota is likely to be correlated with the price of the COE but not the price of housing at various distances from the city center. We find that when the price of a COE increases, the price of housing closer to the city center increases, suggesting that increases in the price of a car cause individuals to increase their willingness to pay to locate closer to the CBD.

Changing frequencies and intensities of extreme weather events directly affect settlement vulnerability; when combined with rapid urbanization, these factors also influence urban resilience to climate-related hazards. This article documents how urban resilience can generally be maximized, before examining how it is impacted by extreme hydro-climatic events (i.e. droughts and floods), with a specific case examination for Singapore. In particular, analysis of Singapore’s climate from 1950 to 2015 indicates (1) a warmer environment, and (2) recent periods of more intense surface dryness. Lastly, this article suggests how specific climate information regarding extreme event attribution can aid municipal stakeholders involved in urban resilience policy.