“Where to draw the line?” That is a land use planning question for the land surveyor and the town planner

Abstract

Inspired by the pioneering work of Bleakley and Ferrie (2014) informed by Libecap and Lueck (2011), this paper develops the thesis of Lai (1996, 1997) that spatial partition of land is a basic land use planning activity, whether by governments or private bodies, which involve decisions on boundary delineation. The primeval foundation of this activity is laying out private property boundaries, which is a metonymic land unitization exercise that defines "clearly defined property rights" in the Coase Theorem and has often been forgotten as a bona fide planning one. All major constitutional changes in nations commence with such a layout exercise, in which the land surveyor plays a principal role; and all land use planning innovations build upon and property development are constrained by this primeval foundation, which has huge transaction cost implications. A Colonial Hong Kong example, the Kowloon Walled City, is used to demonstrate the

Squatting by the privileged? A Hong Kong study on the innovations and ambiguity of property rights of irregular development

“…While this is the subject of a separate paper (Lai, Chau, & Lorne, 2015), suffice it to say that this institutional arrangement of tax collection avoided the tricky issue of squatting and promoted the reclamation of land for farming, something that led to agricultural innovations. In Tokyo, there is a private "Kowloon Walled City" museum to provide visitors with a feel of this demolished Hong Kong squatter city, which sprang up in the absence of any government land, building, or planning control (Lai, 2015). In Western Australia, coastal "shack settlements" built by holidaymakers ("shackies") on Crown land without government permission have been discussed in terms of their heritage value (Selwood & Jones, 2010).…”

Reduction of Circular Arcs in European Cadastral Systems—The Proposal of a Solution Referring to the Recommendations of the INSPIRE Data Specification on Cadastral Parcels

“…The arc division algorithm requires the number of divisions of the approximated arc. This value can be calculated from Equations (7) and (9). The basic question concerns the limit values of dr and c. The authors proposed that the priority value should be the parameter dr. Its value is determined at the level of maximum error of the position m P of the border point in relation to the points of the measurement network.…”

“…J. Geo-Inf. 2020, 9,27 2 of 11 lines or segments are based on the addition of a given number of points that do not significantly affect the quality of the transformation. During the reduction of the number of vertices, the so-called filtration process takes place.…”

“…Unfortunately, this type of approach, apart from the inevitable consequence of changing the method of description of the perimeter of the parcel, changes its area. The area of the parcel is one of the most important parameters describing it [9,10]. Cadastral systems that use the area obtained directly from its analytical designation when converting the data encounter the problem of area change.…”

The determination of the “true” property boundary in planned development: a Coasian analysis

“…Blomley's contribution is important because, as argued by Lai (2015), Lai and Davies (2017) and Lai and Chau (2018), discussion of private property rights seldom touches on the boundary delineation of land as the ontological foundation of land as property. This is interesting since one of the characteristics of private property, like communal property, is exclusivity.…”