The terminology of community-led housing in East Asia should be examined in detail due to its institutional form with unique characteristics and challenges are not confined to Western housing contexts. The mainstream Western conceptual framework neglects the prevalence of community housing form in East Asia: homeowner association and its role in complementing state-led and market-oriented models in housing provision.
This review gains a sharp understanding of community-led housing institutionalization in East Asian contexts and its implication to housing policy-making. An international housing comparison approach investigates configurations of the housing institutions in East Asian developmental regimes by comparing Taiwanese case with South Korean context-sharing institutional, political, and urban development trajectories.
Research suggests that community-led homeowner associations are the most prevalent form in East Asian institutional and housing contexts. Unlike the Western definition of ‘an instrument of private governance’, community-led housing counterbalances market dominance and promotes a sense of community even in deprived neighbourhoods.
Although homeowner association is not typically regarded as community-led housing like housing cooperatives, it has great potential to become ‘community-led’ for promoting social value at the local level. Yet, this housing form’s potential depends on residents’ co-governance capacity.
