Search

In Hong Kong, over half of the Protestant churches are located in the upper-floor units in commercial and residential buildings. Because of their physical locations, these churches are sometimes dubbed ‘upper-floor churches’. Unlike those that occupy stand-alone religious buildings or dwell in church-run schools and social service centres, these are often invisible in the landscapes of the city. Through analysis of a case study, this paper aims to explore the spatial practices that a Protestant community has adopted in acquiring, representing, and ritualising a business unit in a residential high-rise for building up their church. Our analysis of the case study shows that in a metropolis like contemporary Hong Kong, the construction of sacred space is full of tensions between utilitarian calculations and concerns of human relations and religious values. While the congregation had been very creative in transforming a commercial unit into a religious site, it did not show much awareness of the oppressive powers of the capitalist market and had a strong tendency to represent its spatial practices as commodities for consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to filling the knowledge gap on risks in the commercial real estate market in four Chinese cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing. It examines the impact of urban governance, government real estate administration, and market practice in general and the current status of the property investment market in particular, on real estate market risks. The paper concludes that an institutional study needs to be built into a conventional economic analysis model to examine risks in commercial property investment in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, the energy use in large commercial buildings is significantly higher than that in the other building sectors. Monthly electricity consumption data from six large commercial buildings in Shanghai and Beijing in 2006 and 2007 were analyzed by exploring the energy consumption with temperature variations throughout the year. Intrinsic heating and cooling electricity requirements and baseline functional electricity consumptions were identified. Different patterns of energy consumption in buildings emerged and it was possible to separate the intrinsic energy requirements for heating and cooling from other energy uses. In most buildings, it was found that the dominant energy use was for requirements other than heating and cooling and this information provides an important insight into those areas where the most cost effective energy conservation strategies should be targeted. Thus, in many cases improving the thermal performance of the building by technical means will have less impact than reducing the requirements of functional energy use within the building. Such reductions may be achieved either by the deployment of more efficient appliances or through the use of effective energy management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Office and commercial infrastructure in urban China largely disappeared during the period of central planning between 1949 and 1978. The role of downtown areas in China's cities, however, has been reinvented as a result of China's global integration. In Shanghai, comprehensive planning efforts were made for the renovation of the CBD and the restructuring of the inner city. This article examines the emergence of office and commercial landscapes by linking planning implementation to broad market transition. It argues that the emergence of office and commercial centers in Shanghai can be viewed as the result of market forces as well as discretionary implementation of city comprehensive plans by local governments in the inner city--in response to global integration on the one hand and investor interests on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]