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Anne Haila: Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State

Anne Haila Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2015, pp. 304, paperback edition, $44.95. In development studies, Singapore is often cited as a shining example of how adopting a culture of hard work and advanced capitalist behaviour can lead to the success of entire societies. The world development agencies are particularly notorious for presenting the Singaporean case thus and then proceeding to recommend a Singaporean Model. Others, emphasising cultural superiority, tend to claim that it is the 'Asian values' held by Singapore that explain its meteoric rise. So, the culture of poverty is scorned in favour of a Singaporean culture of progress. In Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State, Anne Haila disputes these claims and, in their place, advances a new thesis: that the rise of Singapore is best explained in terms of how the state owns and uses landed property. Singapore is regarded as a property state because it uses its land for social and economic transformation of the city-state and its peoples. Specifically, land is put to public uses such as public housing. Unlike the holy grail of privatisation advocated by the World Bank for the slimming down of the state, Singapore has taken a path of investing and building an elaborate state system that tries to curb speculation and hence influences land values. Indeed, in Singapore, value accruing to land as a result of community and state activities is deducted from 'market value'. These ideas, Haila argues, were influenced by the embrace of Fabianism and Georgism. Generally, these philosophies shape what answers are given to key questions such as 'who gets rent, why and how it is distributed?' (p. 226) as well as the historic debates about the origin of property, the role of property in evolution, and the place of property in driving efficiency (pp. 33-6). The book shows that Singapore offers a path that does not easily sit in the binary 'philosophies of property' segmented into Lockian, individualistic focus and J.J. Rousseau's consent-based models (pp. 36-8). Thus, this book brings a fresh perspective to the historic property rights debates. It brings back the land question from where it is now often located--business and finance, to political economy--continuing and substantially extending into property and political economy of earlier work such as Roger Simon Farrell's A Yen for Real Estate: Japanese Real Estate Investment Abroad--From Boom to Bust (2000). The relational spatial analysis in the book under review attempts to resolve the problem which Charles Gore called 'spatial separatism' in his 1984 classic, Regions in Question: Space, Development Theory and Regional Policy, showing how spatial analysis can be simultaneously cartographic, relative, and relational through property rights analysis. The focus on structural/socio-economic factors, especially property, demonstrates the failure of the cultural approach to development used by many economists and particularly anthropologists to explain the social conditions of Indigenous peoples, African Americans, Africans, and Native Indians. This is a major book in urban political economy and the political economy of development for these reasons but also because it is well written and researched. The endorsement by the master of rent analysis in urban political economy, David Harvey, sums it up: 'This is a must-read for anyone concerned with contemporary economic conditions and trends'. The book is structured into nine chapters. The first sets the scene by anchoring the study to ongoing debates about how best to explain Singapore's development, identifying the gaps, and showing the distinctive approach used by the book to address the gaps. Chapter 2 provides a critical review of the various ideologies of land in the form of land regimes, debates on how they arose, philosophies of property, and ends with a highlight of the economic, social, moral, and political aspects of the land question. …