A catallactic framework of government land reclamation: The case of Hong Kong and Shenzhen

• The research is a novel application of price theory to interpret the state as the subject of regulation by land interests.
• It demonstrates the use of reclamation as a government means to by-pass development restrictions by its subjects.
• It is based on a comparison of Hong Kong with her neighbouring Shenzhen city.

This paper describes three models of state planning for land reclamation and advances a fourth in the form of a modified neo-institutional economic theory of urban rent dissipation by Steven Cheung (1974) to interpret state-led reclamations as a way to break the control of land by land oligarchs. By comparing the concepts of new towns and other strategic reclamations in Hong Kong (HK) and the urban expansion of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SSEZ), this paper illustrates how the idiosyncratic forces of the land market drive the state to seek ways to create land through reclamation to achieve its planning goals.