Full Description
This book examines the "ethics in relation to city and urbanism" by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East-West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance.
This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating political theory, ethics, urban studies, public policy, making applications of ethics and political philosophy to social sciences to examine controversial urban issues in the Hong Kong context. It challenges the general conception that philosophy and ethics are detached from everyday life, with the philosophers engaging mainly in abstract intellectual pursuit and some of them even disdaining "pedestrian" applications of abstract thinking. This book makesapplications of ethics and political philosophy to real-life urban contexts in Hong Kong, thereby trying to highlight the normative in order to throw new light to the general approach and strategy to deal with practical urban issues, facilitating "out-of-the-box" thinking in the field of housing and urban studies, stimulating scholars, researchers, and students in the fields, urban planners, urban managers, and other professionals as well as urban policy-makers.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The Values and Limitations of the Rights Approach to Urban Controversies.- Part I: Conflict of Rights in Urban Issues.- Chapter 3: Sub-Divided Units: Property Rights and Market versus Right to Housing.- Chapter 4: The Rights of Hong Kong's Indigenous Inhabitants: A Comparative Perspective.- Chapter 5: Should Heritage Preservation Trump Protection of Private Property Right?.- Chapter 6: Conceptions of Toleration and Right to Public Space.- Chapter 7: Familial Strangers—Controversies in Migrant Rights in Hong Kong.- Part II: Rights, Interest and Well-being of Human and Non-human Entities.- Chapter 8: When Doing a Rights Talk Isn't Doing the Right Thing: Defining the Urban Space for Stray Dogs and Cats.- Chapter 9: An Examination of the Multiple Approaches by Which the Rights and Worth of Urban Trees May Be Defended: The Case of Stonewall Trees in Hong Kong.- Chapter 10: Reconciling Human Development with Nature's Rights: The Role of Urban Public Park in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.- Chapter 11: Pursuing Unity or Creating Disunity? An East-West Complementary Approach to Urban Controversies Related to the Right to Environment.- Chapter 12: Conclusion.
