Conference Agenda

Place (re-)branding is an important way to increase city competitiveness, renew declined areas, and attract investment and tourists. Various strategies have been implemented to brand a place, such as creating iconic architecture, improving pedestrian-friendly streets, or opening classy café places or boutique shops. However, the image of a place is always simultaneously affected by a mosaic of various elements, such as intangible local culture, profiles of its citizens, built environment, etc. Influenced by these factors collectively, people form a unified perception of an area or a city. This study aims to explore influencing factors of people’s perception of a place and identify and compare the effectiveness of various place branding strategies. We first delineate various elements that form a place identity and use a survey experiment to identify the effects of various factors that shape people’s perceptions of a location. We use Hong Kong, a city that infuses both tangible and intangible multicultural elements, as our research site. Findings from the study inform local policymakers of the effective strategies to (re)brand their jurisdictions to boost economic development, attract tourists and retain investment.

When designing public housing programs, governments must choose whether to rent or sell units, whether to set income limits, and whether to restrict the transfer of sold units. This paper studies Hong Kong’s Tenants Purchase Scheme, which converted 120,000 public rental units into ownership units with transfer restrictions. Leveraging its staggered roll-out between 1998 and 2006, I show that the scheme reduced household sizes in treated estates by 5-7% and increased household incomes by 23%. These effects are not due to housing reallocation or mortgage costs, but rather relaxed means testing and unit allocation rules. Broader policy lessons are discussed.

Prefabricated buildings have shown great advantages in project progress, construction quality, energy saving, and environmental protection in recent years, but their supply chain management level is still low. To improve the performance of prefabricated building supply chain, the emerging blockchain technology is taken as the entry point, this paper constructed a theoretical model of the influence mechanism between blockchain technology and prefabricated building supply chain performance. Taking 175 supply chain members in the engineering construction field as samples, the hierarchical regression analysis and Bootstrap methods were used to carry out an empirical study on the influence mechanism. The results found that there is a significant positive relationship between blockchain technology and prefabricated building supply chain performance. Information sharing plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between blockchain technology and prefabricated building supply chain performance. Trust relationship has a positive impact on prefabricated building supply chain performance, and can positively moderate the relationship between blockchain technology and prefabricated building supply chain performance. Therefore, this paper provided suggestions to improve prefabricated building supply chain performance from three aspects: introducing blockchain technology, strengthening information sharing, and establishing trust relationship, which can help to improve the supply chain management level.

This research has comprehensively evaluated the development of the nine new towns in Hong Kong, focusing on their impacts on economic output and regional equity, in order to provide evidence-based policy recommendations to better strike a balance between efficiency and inclusiveness in the upcoming development of new towns (e.g. Northern Metropolis). It is estimated that the Northern Metropolis plans would generate a 6% annual increase in residential housing units compared to the target of the Long Term Housing Strategy, resulting in a 3.63% GDP growth, a 3.29% increase in welfare gain and an 8.24% increase in employment compared with the base year. It is also found that many new towns confront a serious problem in which the population as of today almost reaches the planned limit, among which the contributions of Yuen Long, Fanling-Sheung Shui to the economy outperform the other new towns. While the contribution of the new towns to the economic growth declines sharply, from the double digits in the 1970s to single-digit in the 1990s, the size of new towns did not significantly impact economic growth. It is indicated that the economic growth of the simultaneous development of new towns would be better than that of the periodic development. Regarding inclusiveness, the inequality of new towns declined in the past four decades, which is built upon the outflows of low-income families and the inflows of middle-or high-income families. Interestingly, there is no sign of housing price bubbles (i.e. capital gain does not far exceeds economic gain) in New Towns, although some housing price bubbles are found to appear in the New Territories that are outside the new town areas.