Mi Shih, Ph.D., Associate Professor and director of the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program, was recognized with the Global Planning Educators’ Interest Group’s (GPEIG) 2025 award for the best journal article.
The award honors outstanding, peer-reviewed journal articles that make a significant contribution to global planning. GPEIG is part of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), working to bring together planning students and educators to share, shape, and incorporate global perspectives into planning education and research.
The paper must have contributed to global planning by making a significant scholarly impact, using a novel approach to data collection or analysis, or speaking to practitioners in a unique way, have been published in a peer-reviewed journal within the past three years, and at least one author must be a regular participant in planning educational networks, such as the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). The award was announced and honored at the GPEIG Business Meeting at the Association for Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) conference in October 2025.
The article “A politically less contested and financially more calculable urban future: Density techniques and heightened land commodification in Taiwan,” is co-authored with Ying-Hui Chiang, Department of Land Economics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. It appeared in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Volume 56, Issue 6, September 2024.
The article examines and makes explicit the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, their depoliticizing effects, and the heightened land commodification in Taiwan’s transition to a real estate–oriented economy.
TDR (Transfer of Development Rights) and density bonusing are two nearly universal practices in urban land development in Taiwan. The authors ask how their technocratic approach, using predetermined formulas to bracket density use while almost entirely foreclosing community negotiation, has played a formative role in accelerating land commodification. Using mixed research methods, the case study of Central North in New Taipei City helps lay bare how formulaic density rules enable planners to embed their epistemic assumptions about what constitutes a good city within intensified property development.
Mimicking the calculative practices of the real estate sector, the authors use residual valuation methods to estimate the maximum price-lifting effects for 18 real estate development projects. They demonstrate that formulaic rules enable density to be incorporated into cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets as a profit booster prior to the actual granting of extra density, thereby emboldening aggressive land brokering, buying, and selling, which in turn drives up land prices.
The authors argue that the technical depoliticization generated by TDR and density bonusing has become the most effective catalyst in creating a politically less contested and financially more calculable urban world in which capital’s acquisitive appetite for land’s monetary value is intensified. They conclude by discussing the implications for shifting density from a domain of technical rules and real estate finance to a politics of land.
Dr. Shih’s research involves two major areas. Building on ethnographic fieldwork methods, she examines Chinese urbanization, particularly the roles of the state, shifting urban-rural boundaries, displacement, changes in people’s livelihoods and social conflicts over land development. Employing mixed-methods research, her second research area focuses on planning regulation, land development rights, land assembly instruments, and the discursive and institutional practices of value capture in urban development in Taiwan.