The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Globalization and the Urban Property Boom in Metro Cebu,Philippines

The hyper mobility of capital and the associated growth of international investment in real estate which occurred across the world in the late twentieth century, led to bursts of property development and market booms. This article examines how this global trend interfaced with local processes in the setting of a secondary metropolis of a developing country, in Metro Cebu, Philippines, and resulted in a property‐led development dominated by production of high‐end residential real estate commodities, the rise of a speculative land market, and a highly regressive spatial allocation. It is argued that this regressive outcome was mediated by a weak state, controlled and dominated by predatory and rent‐seeking bosses who, in Cebu in particular, are not simply representatives of the local oligarchy but are big real estate developers and brokers themselves. During the boom period, neither the middle classes, whose members were also attracted to speculative property buying, nor the low‐income and urban poor groups, who were largely hoodwinked by official rhetoric of social housing reform and by token participation, provided any significant social force to constrain the opportunism and rent‐seeking of these bosses or to challenge the pro‐growth governing agenda.     

The Iron Triangle of Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Political Economy of Urban Corruption in Spain

Despite a cascade of corruption scandals over the last decade, the role of political corruption has yet to be accounted for in the scholarship on Spanish urban entrepreneurialism. This is an omission that extends to the broader literature on the topic as well. This paper looks at the theoretical causes of this neglect and explores ways of integrating corruption into the study of urban entrepreneurialism. To do so, it offers a systematic analysis of the role of clientelism in the political economy of Spanish inter-urban competition. Contrary to the existing literature, which at best explains away corruption as a logical outgrowth of intensified competition for real estate capital, this paper argues that corruption is rooted in a political structure that precedes the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism. This structure is identified as an “iron triangle”, a complex of colluding interests formed by the state, the real estate industry, and political parties.     

The Political Economy of Housing Investment in the Short-Term Rental Market: Insights from Urban Portugal

Short-term rentals (STRs) emerged as holiday accommodations, disrupting the hospitality industry in the decade before COVID-19. Mainstream explanations for their growth revolved around digital tourism platforms like Airbnb as market disruptors and the sharing economy rationale. At the same time, critical scholars explored the capitalisation of greater rent gaps in urban central locations. However, these explanations are insufficient to explain the growth of STRs. We supplement them by building bridges between the urban political economy and the geographies of financialisation through the cases of Lisbon and Porto before the pandemic. The paper focuses on tourism-induced housing investment, taking a closer look at the profile of investors in association with STR property managers in the context of the late-entrepreneurial urban regime. We conclude that tourism development has allowed opportunities for housing financialisation through STR professionalisation, enhancing the allocation of interest-bearing capital in tourism-oriented real estate.     

Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

Housing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly-organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co-constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti-gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.     

城市企业主义视角下的中国城市增长机制研究

我国城市发展自本世纪以来呈现出加快发展的趋势。然而,这一进程尚不均衡和协调。本文通过城市企业主义这一视角,分析中国城市实现空间与经济迅速增长的机制及其所面临的问题。文章首先考察了2001-2009年间的公共财政结构,揭示出中国地方政府治理模式,并对其背后的制度原因进行了分析,以体现出城市企业主义是如何受到高度集中的行政考评体系和分税制这一转型期财政体制的影响。文章接着对地方政府为实现其城市企业主义战略而采用的土地驱动型发展模式进行了研究,最后提出了中国城市发展亟待转型的呼吁。     

Making Real Estate Markets: The Co-Production of Race and Property Value in Early 20th Century Appraisal Science

Analysing the standardisation of appraisal alongside the development of modern real estate markets in the early 20^th century, this article demonstrates that the construction of a racialised proper(tied) economic subjectivity was pivotal for realtors’ ability to secure legitimacy and profit as a burgeoning profession. Appraisal embedded racial logics within real estate markets such that their routine functioning could generate the submarket differentiation necessary for the realisation of class-monopoly rent. This study’s focus on appraisal before federal redlining addresses key lacunae in the historiography of segregation by foregrounding markets’ historical function as infrastructures that produce and spatialise the social difference crucial for profit in real estate. This article also seeks to inform engagements with contemporary processes of land speculation, commodification, and financialisation shaping US cities by advocating attention to the specific mechanisms that constitute race as a modality for the appropriation of surplus by real estate capital.     

Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

Class Monopoly Rent and the Redevelopment of Portland's Pearl District

This study examines the role of class monopoly rent in shaping the spatial form and pattern of urban redevelopment processes in the contemporary neoliberal city. Since an initial flourishing literature during the 1970s and 1980s, urban land rent theory has fallen from the analytic radar of critical urban studies since the early 1990s, with the influence of class monopoly rent often considered an aberration of how capitalist real estate markets normally operate, if not rejected. Consequently, class monopoly rent has never been systematically elaborated. Based on an empirical analysis of Portland's Pearl District, this study suggests that the influence of class monopoly rent in contemporary processes of urban redevelopment is far more pervasive than often recognised, representing a “standard institutional practice” that is endemic (rather than aberrational) to the working of neoliberal urban governing regimes, and embeds in the social and physical landscape in a multiplicity of ways.     

抗战时期的上海华商房地产公司

抗战时期,因人口暴增、游资汇聚、地价暴涨等因素共同作用,上海华商房地产公司有了根本性的发展,第一次主导了上海的房地产市场。本文对抗战时期上海华商房地产公司的崛起及原因、经营内容和业绩、华商房地产同业公会的活动等内容进行了探讨。文章认为,此时期上海华商房地产公司的崛起和活动,是近代中国市场经济进入发展阶段的标志之一。     

现代中国城市居住空间分异机制的理论研究

通过住宅市场空间分异研究体系的建立,认为城市居住空间分异是社会阶(层)级分化结果通过市场宏观控制、个体择居行为心理的局部调整而实现的空间化过程。因此,居住空间分异机制可以从对住房市场空间分化及个体择居行为机制两个方面来理解。从五个方面具体分析影响城市住宅市场分化的机构、各种机构对城市居住空间、社会空间分异的影响力:(1)政府作为土地所有者及其作用形态;(2)城市建筑商、地产开发商的发展方式;(3)金融信贷业对社会空间和物质空间的空间非均衡的影响;(4)地产物业机构对邻里的操纵和强化;(5)城市规划思想与方法的影响。并认为影响我国城市社会地理空间分异的宏观背景是:(1)国内自1978年以来的政治经济体制改革,它确定我们的主要研究框架;(2)自80年代末期开始强化的经济全球化与区域集团造就的新国际劳动分工;(3)信息技术革命为核心的知识经济及其影响下的经济结构变化。     

西安大都市与旅游地产发展互动模式研究

旅游地产作为旅游业与房地产业结合而产生的新兴产业,其发展模式灵活多样。本文从产业与品牌共同提升的视角,剖析了旅游地产与都市发展要素互动模式;从项目与资源共同整合的视角,剖析了旅游地产与都市运营机制互动模式;从内涵与外延共同拓展的视角,以曲江新区、"皇城复兴区"、浐灞生态区、大明宫遗址区、"纺织城"、秦岭北麓休闲游憩带等城市典型功能区为例,剖析了旅游地产与都市空间演化互动模式,进而论证了西安旅游地产在西安都市发展中的核心带动作用。在此基础上,试图探索一条通过旅游地产开发带动都市圈空间与人文资源整合,从而实现城市全面、协调、可持续发展的全新路径。     

我国城市街区单元平面形态的演替:现状、动因及规律

论文基于相关城市的土地利用数据对城市街区单元平面形态的变化规律进行理论模拟和定量分析。研究结果表明,在外向型城市扩张模式或内向型城市更新模式下,城市街区单元的空间尺度都有明显的增大趋向,区域范围内街区单元的数量也相应减少。造成这一趋势的主要原因在于在经济和社会需求驱动下的建设模式,以房地产企业为代表的社会力量成为城市街区成型的主导力量,基于成本-收益等经济利益考虑,企业倾向于扩大开发项目的空间体量,从而造成了城市街区单元尺度的增大;这一变化本身也深刻影响了城市的居民生活和产业活动。     

Artificial Scarcity in Housebuilding and the Impact on Affordability: The Return of Absolute Rent

The slow response of volume housebuilders to changes in demand has been cited as a contributing cause of a global crisis of housing affordability and allegations of land banking have persistently dogged the industry. This article reviews the supply responsiveness of speculative housebuilders in the United Kingdom and Australia through the neglected Marxian analytic category of absolute rent. Absolute rent directs attention to the relationship between the value of land and the cost of housing and models a market in which landowners may withdraw land from supply to inflate prices. Through the lens of absolute rent, the real estate practices of the housebuilding industry can be understood as a strategy of artificial scarcity straddling land and housing markets. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the insights to be gained by a return to absolute rent that valuably expand the current debate on the supply and cost of housing.     

How real estate became ‘just another asset class’: the financialization of the investment strategies of Dutch institutional investors

The managers of a growing wall of money are continuously searching for investment opportunities. The financialization literature describes how this mobile capital puts pressure on commodities, debt, public services and economic activities to transform into investable, tradable, financial products. Regarding real estate, these investigations show how opaque, local, non-standardized goods, highly depending on both local legislation and developments, have been transformed into liquid, globally traded financial assets. By analysing the real estate investment strategies of Dutch institutional investors since the 1980s, this paper shows how a quantitative framework increasingly provides the basis for institutional investors’ real estate investment strategies. Direct ownership of properties has been exchanged into shares of properties, that is, fictitious capital, creating an impetus for ‘objectified numbers’ to measure the performance of these indirect investments. As knowledge about real estate has been outsourced, Dutch institutional investors now perceive real estate increasingly as ‘just another asset class’, thereby increasing leverage and volatility. This paper not only shows how finance ‘financialized’ itself by adopting a quantitative investment perspective, but it also offers an empirical account on how investment properties are transformed into financial assets that put pressure on state agencies to mobilize urban planning to deliver more of such assets.     

转型背景下原单位职工迁居行为特征与机制——以广州市海珠区江南中街为例

本文研究原居住在江南中街单位职工的迁居行为,浅析其形成迁居意向的过程和择居特征。结果表明:单位职工的迁居比例超过60％,且迁居空间模式以近距离的近域迁移为主,近岗迁移和郊区迁移为辅,迁居方向联系较弱。分析其原因:经济改革和城市经济发展是促成单位职工迁居的基本前提,迁居户的经济能力是根本的决定依据,决定了迁出地和迁居形式。本文调查对象-单位职工具有一定的职业及收入共性,因此他们在迁居时所考虑的因素还包括了居住惯性,家庭生命周期、生活方式改变的需求及作为单位职工特定的社会因素等。     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

Urbanisation and Financialisation in the Context of a Rescaling State: The Case of Spain

The secondary circuit is a central element in the processes of capital accumulation, and its relevance has become more acute in recent years as urban planning, housing, and real estate have become privileged arenas of the territoriality “variegated” processes of neoliberalisation. This paper explores three theoretical concepts, all closely associated with neoliberalisation: the rescaling of the state, urban entrepreneurialism and financialisation. The paper uses these three theoretical concepts to explain, on the one hand, the increasing relevance of housing and real estate and, on the other hand, their connection with two of the major manifestations of the current financial crisis: excessive private indebtedness and the credit crunch. Analysing the Spanish case is particularly revealing because of the intensity of construction work until 2007, the severity of the subsequent economic crisis, and the wide range of agents involved in the growth of a neoliberalised and financialised secondary circuit of capital in Spain.     

会展中心对城市房地产的触媒效应研究——以广州国际会展中心为例

本文基于城市触媒视角,以广州国际会展中心为案例,探讨会展中心对城市房地产的触媒效应。研究表明:其一,会展中心具有变化、综合的触媒效应,它存在触媒强度、触媒对象和触媒机理的特征。具体表现为触媒强度呈现距离衰减规律,触媒对象主要是与会展相关的形式和项目,且受到城市其他元素的作用增强或减弱;其二,会展中心带动了周边房地产的开发和建设,提升房地产的价格,影响房地产的功能定位;其三,会展中心对城市房地产的影响来源于会展中心以及其所承载的会展活动两个方面。     

FEEDBACK BETWEEN REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS*

ABSTRACT This paper considers the implications of increasing land supply constraints in the United States on urban demand. First, because shifts in demand are now capitalized more into the price of land, house prices in some metropolitan areas have grown increasingly unaffordable to typical households. This might have an effect on the fundamental character of such cities. Second, the effect of home owners’ financial interests as landowners on their decisions about what regulations or investments in their communities to support may become stronger. Third, researchers may now be able to better use land prices to make inferences about urban demand. However, interpreting real estate prices still is tricky.