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Seeing Urban Theory Through the Real Estate Lens
How has real estate changed the development of urban theory?
Alexia Yates, 2021. Real Estate and Global Urban History, Cambridge University Press.https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/real-estate-and-global-urban-history/B5E3F63C7A1433E1DE4297BBEEAFF1B3Real estate is foundational to their development and core to much theoretical work on the urban environment. It is also a central, pressing matter of political contestation in contemporary cities. Yet it remains largely without a history. As one of the books recently published in Elements in Global Urban History, Real Estate and Global Urban History examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of (dis)possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels. The full text is free online from 22nd June - 6th July.Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3, Urban Theory, Through the Real Estate Lens, which reviews how real estate has changed the development of urban theory.Real estate and the social science of the city were born together. Starting from the nineteenth century, real estate has provided one of the most influential modes of 'seeing' a city, of divining its evolution and theorizing its organization. To administrators who ordered cadastral surveys to render the income and tax liability of urban property visible to the state, or to late nineteenth-century insurance companies who mapped the risk associated with fire (and later, housing finance), real estate has provided the basis for influential renderings of urban space (Figure 2).
Figure 2 The city rendered as real estate: Outline of Robinson's Real Estate Atlas of New York City (Manhattan Island), 1889.
Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed 7 February 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a1ec3dd4-57b3-e18d-e040-e00a18064727
Private actors, like real estate agents and developers, were important contributors to this growing world of paper representations of urban change. Their maps, schematics of lots for sale, diagrams of building and apartment layouts – all collated in new gazettes and other publications that attested to the construction of local real estate 'markets' – became some of the most familiar representations of cities in circulation.
Figure 4 The Roberts And Wolfskill Tract, For Sale by Snyder & Gillis, 467 Ninth Street, Oakland, Cal., United States, 1887.
David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.
This vernacular urban science produced important sources and approaches for early sociologists and what would soon become known as land economics. The ring models of urban property values discerned and declaimed by realtors in the early-twentieth century were translated, through urban plans and textbooks, into the zonal theory of concentric circles that characterized the Chicago School of sociology's model of urban growth. As Lewinnek argues regarding Ernest Burgess, a leading member of Chicago's 'ecological' school, "Burgess adapted a half-century of realtors' maps and codified them in a model of abstraction and urban theory that has been called – with some hyperbole – 'the most famous diagram in social science' ".
Similar models were designed by real estate observers in Paris, where for instance in 1863 the uncle of the famous prefect Baron Haussmann penned a guide to estimating property values based on concentric "zones" in the capital city. Data composed by realtors proved an invaluable source for early sociologists studying French cities’ property dynamics. Maurice Halbwachs's famous 1909 study of Parisian land values drew heavily on the impressive volume of real estate transactions compiled by the real estate agency of John Arthur et Tiffen, published as the Guide Foncier, or Land Guide, in 1886.Halbwachs's volume used real estate prices and transactions as a means to discover patterns and rules of urban growth. While his findings did not embrace the distinct concentric zone model of the Chicago School, he pursued its ideas on the organic nature of the city, concluding that cities develop in accordance with the natural (though perhaps dimly understood) "needs" of their inhabitants. Back in Chicago, alterations on the concentric model were developed by a realtor, Homer Hoyt, who would become an important contributor to the new discipline of land economics. Hoyt composed his comprehensive One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago as part of a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1933. This research into land values became the basis for a theory of real estate cycles; his later work with the Federal Housing Administration helped him formulate an influential "sector theory" of urban growth, which revised the concentric zonal model by suggesting a radial pattern of growth.Real estate, then, provided the substance and background for crucial early work in the social science of urban growth. Yet the economic perspective on urban property and socio-spatial dynamics that it enabled did not become a guiding concern in the field of sociology or urban theory for some time. Classic sociological analyses of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century – from Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel in Germany, to Louis Wirth and other members of the Chicago School in the United States – remained more concerned with culture, and did not linger over the urban imaginaries and social spaces that real estate could constitute.Still, the cultural life of cities as early urban theory pursued it was fundamentally an inquiry into the operations of cities under capitalism – evidenced in preoccupation with the growth of markets, commoditization, and abstraction and the influence of these forces on human consciousness and community. Critical theorists like Walter Benjamin reflected on the relationship between culture and economy as it informed the landscape and experience of the modern city. Benjamin's Arcades Project and his sketches, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935/1939)" approached the city as consumerist icon and assemblage, with fragments and ephemera of urban modernity simultaneously moving through and congealing in the built spaces of the city: its department stores, boulevards, theatres, and importantly, commercial arcades.These materials and spaces were expressions of capitalist relations, mediating forces (rather than mere reflections) of their operation; the visual culture of the city both veiled social relations of production and enabled new kinds of relations and politics to be born. Benjamin's arcades – as he well knew – were speculative real estate ventures, simultaneously a materialization and conduit for capital, as well as for distinct modes of viewing and being in the city. His valorization of the poet Charles Baudelaire’s memorable definition of modernity – "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable" – aligns purposively with the fixed and movable components of real estate: the concrete material of built space and land, combined with the circulation of people, goods, and capital it sustains.In the 1970s, in the context of a global surge in land and house prices, a political economy approach gained currency in urban studies, and the economistic concerns with real property that had earlier been diverted into land economics and (somewhat less) into urban geography made an influential return to urban theory. Marxist thought provided a central register for this return, in favor of theorization on regimes of production and labor relations in the making of the city.Real estate occupies a central role in the thinking of David Harvey, the most important Marxist theorist of cities and urbanization. In The Limits to Capital (1982) and elsewhere, Harvey has developed one of the most influential frameworks for reconsidering the role of space in the historical evolution of capitalism. His theory of a "spatial fix" refers to the ability of capital to reproduce itself and to delay inherent crises of over-accumulation by expanding in space and by circulating through the built environment. Capital is thus "fixed" – i.e. immobilized – and capitalism itself (temporarily) repaired by redirecting surplus profits from the primary circuit of production and consumption into a secondary circuit of the built landscape. This switching allows the process of accumulation to continue and introduces new temporalities to the process of circulation. The tensions between the speeds at which capital circulates in its different circuits are productive of our built and social spaces. By their very materiality, our cities, factories, homes, and transportation networks enjoy a durability that is at once the condition of their devaluation – capital moves while these spaces do not – and the factor that means that they can constitute a new plane upon which capital will once more reproduce itself after a crisis. In short, the modes through which capital operates are, to Harvey, impossible to grasp without an understanding of the spaces that it appropriates, creates, and in turn, destroys in inevitable crises of devaluation.Moreover, it is not just space that is mobilized by capital’s process of reproduction. That the circulation of capital shapes space and place are insights Harvey shares with many urban scholars, most notably French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre. The mechanism that Harvey finds particularly influential is rental appropriation, which demands the construction of real estate and, importantly, liquid real estate markets. Capital can take the form of rent (in addition to that of interest or profits) only when "trade in land is reduced to a special branch of the circulation of interest-bearing capital" – in other words, when land is commoditized and subject to market directives.Harvey's insights into the special qualities of real estate as capital and commodity have been deeply influential in urban studies. In John Logan and Harvey Molotch's Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, they undergird "an effort to construct a sociology of cities on the basis of a sociology of urban property relations". Adding a focus on human activism, institution-building, and identity construction to the somewhat anonymous workings of capital privileged in neo-Marxian accounts, their work elaborates on the political and sociological consequences for cities of the tensions between real estate's use and exchange value. Urban "growth machines", or communities of interest premised on the exploitation of real estate's exchange value, arrange themselves against the "certain preciousness" that use value represents for owners and residents of particular places – and, indeed, align themselves against growth machines from other cities in an intra-urban competition for capital. In this way, the constitutive elements of real estate as a market good produce interest groups of developers, politicians, residents, and community organizers that shape the nature and experience of particular urban places.In this conceptualization, real estate became a central problematic of studies of neoliberal urbanism. Neoliberal urbanism refers to the way that the restructurings associated with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s – particularly, privatization and market deregulation – operate through and on the urban context.Both the material spaces and governance regimes of cities are transformed as relationships between municipalities, national states, and capital are realigned, in processes that are both global and constitutively uneven. Restructuring of housing markets is a key terrain for the neoliberalizing process, as public provision of housing is side-lined (sometimes physically destroyed) in favor of market-based, investor-oriented mechanisms of supply. Gentrification attracted attention early as a key spatial process in neoliberal urbanism. Neil Smith's work explained its patterns with reference to an imagined "rent gap" between the current returns to a piece of land and the potential returns that would follow from its "highest and best use" (Smith, 1996, 2002). This gap, the size of which depends on a range of factors – including, as Sharon Zukin (1982) has shown, the place-making and place-branding "work" of cultural producers and artistic communities – pulls speculative capital in and out of different neighborhoods as the perceived opportunity for gains increases. In a similar fashion, and as real estate finance is increasingly globalized, capital moves between cities, and contributes significantly to the financialization of the global economy.Here, theories of neoliberal urbanism dovetail with studies of the "global city". Perhaps most familiar thanks to the work of Saskia Sassen (1994), this vein of research aims to re-situate cities – as political entities, sites of economic production, and material assemblages – in studies of globalization. In place of a "placeless" story of globalization advancing through a spatial flattening born of an ever faster and more frictionless movement of information and capital, the global city literature asserts the significance of the territorialization of global processes at the urban scale. The urban is a place where the global is produced.This perspective reaffirms real estate' status as a central agent in urbanization and the production of urban scales. Real estate not only composes the crucial sites and material infrastructures necessary for the exchange of things, people, and ideas on a transnational level; it also acts as receptacle and conduit for the capital generated in globalized (and financialized) regimes of production. Harvey’s theorization of real estate and capitalism is relevant here: cities – or, more broadly, the urban – are shaped to heighten the efficiency and productivity of capital flows, and the built and social spaces that result channel and constrain the operation of capital.
Figure 5 Possessive individualism, condo-style. Toronto Man (2019). Sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol for property developers Camrost Felcorp, Toronto, Canada.
Image credit: John Lorinc, used with permission and thanks.
In this review, I have reconstructed the place that real estate has occupied in urban theory – an attempt to "see" urban theory through the lens of real estate. In the process, we can attribute a much deeper historicity to real estate. Following real estate as a technology of imagining and constructing modern cities can thus help globalize urban theory and significantly expand the perspectives brought to bear on urban development.CityReads ∣Notes On Cities"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
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