关键词: 容积奖励, 都市更新, 制度改革, 台湾地区

Abstract: Local governments always consider urban renewal as a quite important means to deal with the decline of the old urban areas and capture the appreciation of shadow land rent. The main goal of urban renewal is essentially to rebalance the existing interest patterns and also redistribute the land value-added income. During urban renewal, the realization of the public welfare policy goal and promotion of the urban renewal is always a game between the local governments and developers. For the government, the public welfare policies cannot be too rigid, or the land value-added benefits may be reduced and developers may lack the impetus for urban renewal. Similarly, public welfare policies can be absent completely, or public benefits in the urban renewal might be seized completely. During this process, Floor Area Ratio (FAR) awards have become an important institutional tool for the local government to balance development impetus and public interests. The local governments can partially substitute the improvement of the development intensity for the public facilities requiring urgent improvement by using the FAR awards, thus improving the overall public welfare of urban renewal projects. However, in the applied practices of urban renewal in the Chinese mainland, there are still some disadvantages in the employed FAR awards system design since it has been explored for only 10 years or so. Hence, the FAR awards system failed to achieve the expected public welfare effect during the process of urban renewal. Instead, the development intensity of the renewal project has been improved significantly and the public interests are damaged seriously. Similar problems can be found in Taiwan, China. Since the government of Taiwan restricts the upper limit and the calculation standards of FAR awards too rigidly, it is difficult for the local governments to design incentive policies for local public interests, which need to be improved. At the same time, there are floating items in the calculation formula of the FAR awards, thus causing conflicts between the developers and the original residents. Hence, the progress of urban renewal has been seriously affected. Public welfare facilities have finally become private facilities in the community since they are constructed according to the regulations and some even have obvious properties of clubs. These facilities are useless to improve the overall public interests of the city. The development intensity of the FAR awards increased also the operation pressure over the urban public service facilities. In 2019, it was announced by the government of Taiwan a new version of the Regulations for Urban Renewal and FAR Award Regulations during Urban Renewal to deeply reform the FAR awards system. This new reform increases the possibility for the local government to formulate policies according to the local conditions by combining rigid and flexible governance decisions. As a result, the floating items in the FAR awards standards were deleted and the direct correspondence between the evaluation level and the FAR awards was set, which further clarified the specific contents of FAR awards. Moreover, the refined FAR awards control was further increased by deleting provisions difficult to be evaluated, amending provisions with ambiguous public welfare, and adding provisions with clear public welfare benefits. Finally, the problems caused by the institutional defects were solved properly. According to the comparison, the respective problems in the FAR awards system in Shenzhen were similar to those in Taiwan before the reform. Although the spatial scales in Shenzhen and Taiwan were different, the bureaucratic governance structures were similar. Therefore, it is difficult to formulate the FAW awards system according to the local conditions due to the poor governance flexibility of the district-level government. Moreover, the accounting and auditing models of the FAR awards are similar and there's a lack of public interest caused by the institutional defects. However, Taiwan and Shenzhen have some differences in the follow-up supervision. Generally speaking, the reform measures of the FAR awards system in Taiwan still have good references to Shenzhen. The reform that combines rigid and flexible governance, improves public welfare of the FAR awards, and increases the transparency of the FAR awards can relieve the problems related to the FAR awards system to some extent.

Key words: FAR awards, urban renewal, institutional reform, Taiwan