Introduction

This book examines the “ethics in relation to city and urbanism” by evaluating the strengths and limitations of rights as a conceptual tool from the comparative East–West perspective in resolving urban controversies (involving conflicts of rights between different classes, different groups within the present generation, present vs future generations, human vs animals, human vs plants and nature), thereby facilitating urban policy-making and good urban governance.

Approach and Significance

This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating political theory, ethics, urban studies, public policy, making applications of ethics and political philosophy to social sciences to examine controversial urban issues in the Hong Kong context. It challenges the general conception that philosophy and ethics are detached from everyday life, with the philosophers engaging mainly in abstract intellectual pursuit and some of them even disdaining “pedestrian” applications of abstract thinking. This book makes applications of ethics and political philosophy to real-life urban contexts in Hong Kong, thereby trying to highlight the normative in order to throw new light to the general approach and strategy to deal with practical urban issues, facilitating “out-of-the-box” thinking in the field of housing and urban studies, stimulating scholars, researchers, and students in the fields, urban planners, urban managers, and other professionals as well as urban policy-makers.