From fragmentation to framework: A multi- and cross-scale review of property regimes in urban redevelopment

Abstract

Urban redevelopment is not merely a spatial intervention, but a complex, multi-scalar institutional process shaped by diverse property rights regimes and a wide array of actors. In this review, property regimes are understood in an extended sense: not only as legal-institutional frameworks, but as multi-scalar systems through which property rights are allocated and exercised via context-specific property arrangements. While existing scholarship has addressed urban transformation and property institutions separately, few studies have systematically integrated these domains through a unified analytical lens. Anchored in the conceptual tension between politico-economic sanction and social entitlement, the review reconceptualizes urban property regimes through three types of cross-scalar institutional frictions: (1) Transformation—between legal clarity and historical ambiguity; (2) Instrument—between capital efficiency and socio-spatial dispossession; and (3) Indicator—between top-down redevelopment rationales and bottom-up claims for justice. Within the Indicator dimension, the review introduces the concept of Property Inclusiveness as a normative-evaluative lens for diagnosing exclusionary redevelopment practices and envisioning more equitable institutional pathways. To formalize these insights, the study constructs a Cross-Scalar Friction Matrix, a novel analytical tool for mapping how institutional frictions unfold vertically across scales. By integrating fragmented literatures and repositioning Global South practices as sources of theoretical innovation rather than contextual exceptions, this review advances a more adaptive and scale-sensitive understanding of property regimes in urban redevelopment. It calls for future research to explore how institutional adaptability and digital co-governance tools can be embedded into formal structures to reconcile capital logic with spatial justice.