Disentangling the geography of finance and real estate: competing space-times of decision-making and uneven spatial development

Abstract

The versatile ‘city building’ processes are in the focus of this issue. The author’s papers deal with a plurality of related issues such as the complexities of the increasing transparency of local property markets or the tight relations between city planners and (inter-)national investors. As the built environment decides on a city’s economic prospect and determines future planning and development opportunities, the consequences of city building processes are multifaceted. Financial processes of urban (re)development, for example, are discussed at the cutting edge of a larger process of uneven development, which is rooted in the structure of the capitalist mode of production and fuels controversial debates on the ownership of the city. The current edition aims to attract further attention to the complex of financial matters and the production of the built environment with the intention to locate both more centrally within geography, planning, and economics. Against this background, this introduction spans the idea of the decision-making itself in financial and real estate markets, which can neither be limited to a singular moment nor be separated from the context in which they take place. Disentangling these market interdependencies and illustrating the context dependency of decision-making is a common theme in all of the papers included in this issue.

Privatization, Financialization and State Restructuring in Eastern Germany: The case of Am südpark

“…Moreover, most of the academic literature on financialization in urban studies has looked at the US and the UK as paradigms of financialized economies (Krippner, 2005; Orhangazi, 2006, Langley, 2008). Thus, while it is widely accepted that the dynamics of financialization depend on the actual institutional settings and market conditions in a particular location (Weber, 2010; Lee and Cheng, 2011; Dörry and Handke, 2012; Heeg, 2013; Theurillat and Crevoisier, 2013; 2014; Fields, 2015; Kaika and Ruggiero, 2016; Savini and Aalbers, 2016), the debate has to date been primarily focused on contexts in which owner‐occupation, high mortgage debt and liberalized markets are the norm. While there is wide agreement in the literature that Germany is different from this norm and has only moved slowly with regard to the financialization of its housing sector, we study how the changing structure of the German rental sector offers new opportunities for profit seekers (see also Albers and Holm, 2008; Müller, 2012; Heeg, 2013), thus casting the system into flux.…”

Housing in Germany and the Rebirth of the High-Rise in Post-Modern Urban Design

“…Interestingly, the literature on growth politics in German cities also rarely refers to the role of high-rise buildings (for Berlin, see Altrock, 2003;Colomb, 2013;Lehrer, 2002;Strom & Mayer, 1998). This can probably be attributed to the specific economic development in Germany with a delayed financialization in the international context and an enormously increased pressure on inner-city real estate markets since the global financial crisis (Dörry & Handke, 2012;Schipper & Wiegand, 2015;Wijburg & Aalbers, 2017; see also Brake & Herfert, 2012). With regard to life in residential high-rise buildings, sociological studies played a significant role early on in the critique of modern housing developments (for an overview, see Herlyn, 1970;Zupan, 2021).…”

Real estate investment and urban density: exploring the polycentric urban region using a topological lens

“…As Blomley (2019) has argued, expert professional knowledge has increasingly brought about the 'situatedness' of property within wider networks of calculation and commodification. However, the apparent dichotomy arising between the 'fixing' of real estate investment and capital in densely developed cities (Jessop, 2000;Dorry and Handke, 2012) and the territorial governance objective of balanced PUR development, remains under-explored in empirical research.…”