SAGE has just announced that to celebrate the 25th anniversary and the 50th issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization (http://eau.sagepub.com/content/by/year), all contents of the journal are given free access. This is for a limited period only until 9th December 2013.

This also means two of my papers from the journal, listed below, are freely available until the date:

Shin, H.B. and Li, B. (2013) Whose Games? The costs of being “Olympic citizens” in Beijing.Environment and Urbanization 25(2): 549-566 View on the journal site

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ABSTRACT. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games tend to be accompanied by copious media coverage of the negative social impacts of these events, and people in the affected areas are often thought to share similar experiences. The research in this paper, which focused on the Beijing Summer Olympic Games of 2008, unpacks the heterogeneous groups in a particular sector of the housing market to gain a better understanding of how the Games affected different resident groups. The paper critically examines the experience of migrant tenants and Beijing citizens (landlords in particular) in “villages-in-the-city� (known as cheongzhongcun), drawing on their first-hand accounts of the citywide preparations for the Games and the pervasive demolition threats to their neighbourhoods. The paper argues that the Beijing Summer Olympiad produced an uneven, often exclusionary, Games experience for a certain segment of the urban population.

Shin, H.B. (2008) Living on the edge: financing post-displacement housing in urban redevelopment projects in Seoul. Environment and Urbanization Vol.20 No.2, pp.411-426. View on the journal site

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the displacement experiences of urban poor tenants in Seoul, South Korea, and the constraints on their financing of post-displacement housing. Since the mid-1980s, urban renewal of slums and dilapidated neighbourhoods in Seoul has been geared towards clearance and wholesale redevelopment. This approach is accompanied by legalization of land tenure for dwelling owners without de jure property rights, and is based on profit-led partnerships between property owners (both on-site dwelling owners and absentee landlords) and developers. Since the end of the 1980s, tenants have been given the option, if eligible, of in-kind compensation (access to a public rental flat) or cash compensation. Neither choice, however, reflects the needs of poor tenants who still find it difficult to finance inevitably increased housing expenditures. Policy measures are necessary to increase the range of options available to tenants upon displacement.

(Selected images from the paper: Nangok (난곡) neighbourhood before and after the redevelopment)