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Property Developers' Role in Urbanization

Decent Essays

Property speculators are those who invest in different kinds of properties such as residential properties, offices, shopping malls and so on. They buy the property at a low price but sell it at a high price and the difference between two prices is their profit. This essay will focus on only one type of speculators – property developers and their role in urban change. Property developers who buy a piece of land and build offices or housings and then sell to the public to gain profit.

Urban change is the impact of urbanization. Urbanization means the percentage increase in the urban population. When the urban population increase much more than that of rural areas, urbanization occurrs. In general, urban change is the change in all …show more content…

With a nice living environment, plenty of facilities and a high living standard in urban area, more people are eager to move to urban area. This causes a further increase in urban population and adverses the problem of inadequate living space.

To deal with the problem mentioned above, the property developers therefore create much residential land use. In the 1960s, Tin Shui Wai and Admiralty were for fishery and military port respectively. But in the early 2000s, the developers turned the originally land uses to residential, recreational and commercial land use which enlarged the size of the urban areas. Besides, the economy in Hong Kong is at its peak before 1997. The demand for commercial land use was high. The property developers urged the government reclaim Victoria Harbour to obtain more land for building more commercial buildings and offices which are profitable. One of the significant example is Chek Lap Kok airport which is reclaimed from the sea to facilitate the economic growth. These show that the property developers expand outwards to get more land and it leads to urban change.

There is another way of outward expansion and that is the expansion of built-up area into rural areas. That means originally the land is used for agriculture but the developers convert them into urban land uses. Tai po is a good example to illustrate this point. In the 1950s, Tai Po was a piece of

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