Condominium Governance And Law In Global Urban Context

This book examines condominium, property, governance, and law in international and conceptual perspective and reveals this urban realm as complex and mutating. Condominiums are proliferating the world over and transforming the socio-spatial organization of cities and residential life. The collection assembles arguably the most prominent scholars in the world currently working in this broad area and situated in multiple disciplines, including legal and socio-legal studies, political science, public administration, and sociology. Their analyses span condominium governance and law on five continents and in nine countries: the United States (US), China, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, South Africa, Israel, Denmark, and Spain. Neglected issues and emerging trends related to condominium governance and law in cities from Tel Aviv to Chicago to Melbourne are discerned and analysed. The book pursues fresh empirical inquiries and cogent conceptual engagements regarding how condominiums are governed through law and other means. It includes accounts of a wide range of governance difficulties including chronic anti-social owner behaviour, short-term rentals, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they are being dealt with. By uncovering crucial cross-national commonalities, the book reveals the global urban context of condominium governance and law as empirically rich and conceptually fruitful. The book will appeal to researchers and students in socio-legal studies, law, sociology, political science, urban studies, and public administration as well as journalists, social activists, policymakers, and condo owners/board members.

When condominiums first emerged in North American cities in the 1960s, they were a new kind of housing governed by boards of resident owners volunteering in a community. Condo Conquest shows how the condo and its inner governance have since become something else entirely, taken over – or conquered – by an assemblage of commercial interests specializing in condo law, real estate, security, and property management, as well as growing numbers of non-resident investors. Drawing on the accounts of residents and board directors in Toronto and New York and myriad other sources, Randy Lippert reveals how a growing reliance on commodified technologies, emergent forms of knowledge, and the exploitation of renters are threatening the condo’s future and undermining the integrity of urban communities.

The old saying ‘safe as houses’ is being challenged around the world like never before. Over recent decades homeowners have experienced the devastating effects of defects like asbestos, leaky buildings, structural failings, and more recently the combustible cladding crisis. The provision of safe and secure housing is a critical starting point to ensure that social value can be delivered in the built environment. However, some of these dangerous defects have resulted in a lack of security, safety, health, well-being, and social value for households and the wider community. The problems homeowners experience go beyond the substantial financial costs for defect rectification. Too often there has been a lack of government and industry support to help the housing consumer through these issues or to prevent them from occurring to begin with. It is time for a rethink and restructure of government policy, support, and industry practices to better protect housing consumers and deliver high-quality and sustainable housing that creates social value. Through evidence-based research and international case studies, this book focuses on the effects that dangerous defects have on the housing consumer. The ongoing construction cladding crisis is used as a primary case study throughout to highlight these implications, with other previous large-scale defect examples, such as leaky buildings and asbestos. Based upon the range of emerging evidence, we propose ideas for policy makers, construction and built environment professionals, owners corporations, and households on how to move forward towards a higher-quality, sustainable, and socially valuable way of residential living. Government policy has long focused on ‘making industry work’ through building regulations and standards. It is now time for greater government and industry focus on the consumer to make ‘consumer protection work’ in the built environment. There is a need to prevent dangerous defects like combustible cladding, better support consumers when defects emerge, and to create buildings for social value rather than minimum standards. Now is the time to build a better future for the end-user.

This handbook brings together diverse perspectives, major topics, and multiple approaches to one of the biggest legal institutions in society: property. Property touches on many fundamental human questions. It involves decisions about power, economy, morality, work, and ecology. It also involves ideas about where humans fit in the world and how humans relate to more-than-human life. This book will ask in myriad ways such questions as: what property means, what kinds of property there are, what is and should be the relationship between owned and owner, and what is the impact of different forms of property on life in this world? Drawing on a range of socio-legal and empirical methodologies, renowned scholars and rising stars in property from around the world present current issues and map future directions in research. Coming from the place of law but reaching out through cognate disciplines, this handbook provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of current research at the interface of property, society, and the environment. This handbook will appeal to students and researchers across a range of disciplines, including law, sociology, geography, history, and economics.

Gated Luxury Condominiums in India: A Socio-Spatial Arena for New Cosmopolitans critically examines gated luxury condominiums in contemporary India, exploring their role in shaping elite power and identity within the framework of neoliberalism. It delves into the spatial structure, perception and post-occupancy experience of these enclaves, offering valuable insights into India's urban development. This book convincingly elucidates the complex socio-spatial transformations underway in India, inviting readers to understand the depth and breadth of these changes, particularly within the rapidly expanding middle and upper-middle classes. It adopts a robust multi-disciplinary approach, combining methodologies such as spatial ethnography, threshold mapping, qualitative interviews and discourse analysis. Focused on the architectural typology of luxury condominiums, the study serves as a lens for broader social transformations grounded in case studies from Mumbai and Pune. Through a meticulous dissection of the lived experiences of various categories of users – owners, visitors and service staff – the book unveils the complex socio-spatial hierarchies perpetuated within these enclaves. Drawing on theories of cosmopolitanism and postcolonial critiques, the monograph makes a significant scholarly contribution to the disciplines of architecture and the built environment. It fills a gap in the existing literature on modern domesticity in India, offering original research that highlights how architecture is instrumental in socially divisive practices of elite formation. It will appeal to scholars, researchers and students across disciplines like architecture, landscape design, spatial sociology, urban studies and area studies, focusing on India and South Asia. It is particularly compelling for those interested in the sociocultural dynamics of the middle class, encompassing themes such as domesticity, material culture and spatial politics within the context of Indian condominiums.

This innovative book defines the concept of immured spaces across time, space and culture and investigates various categories of restricted places such as divided, segregated and protected spaces.

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents the latest attempt by the international community to live up to the challenges of a planet that is out of control. Sustainable Development Goal 11 envisages inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities around the world by the year 2030. This globally agreed vision is part of a trend in international policy toward good urban governance, and now awaits implementation. Fourteen original contributions collectively examine how this global vision has been developed on a conceptual level, how it plays out in various areas of (global) urban governance and how it is implemented in varying local contexts. The overarching hypothesis presented herein is that SDG 11 proves that local governance is recognised as an autonomous yet interrelated part of the global pursuit of sustainable development. The volume analyses three core questions: How have the normative ideals set forth in SDG 11 been developed? What are the meanings of the four sub-goals of SDG 11 and how do these relate to each other? What does SDG 11 imply for urban law and governance in the domestic context and how are local processes of urban governance internationalised? The Globalisation of Urban Governance makes an important scholarly contribution by linking the narrative on globalisation of good urban governance in various social sciences with legal discourse. It considers global governance and connects the existing debate about cities and their place in global governance with some of the most pertinent questions that lawyers face today.

Effective and efficient housing management is important to support the implementation of key UN agreements, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the New Urban Agenda and the Geneva UN Charter on Sustainable Housing. Efficient housing management results in economic benefits and decent housing conditions for inhabitants of condominiums. Housing management, through housing refurbishment programmes, protects the environment and contributes to decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, which supports the efforts of governments and stakeholders to address climate change.