The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment

Abstract

Spurred by the conviction that not only financial capital but also changes in finance and changes in its relations with non‐financial activities have immense and complicated consequences for ongoing processes of urban redevelopment, this article puts the presently separate financialization and urban redevelopment literatures in conversation. The article begins with a review of the financialization literature, outlining and evaluating four different approaches to the topic and seeking to consider what, if anything, they might have to offer to an area of inquiry that has long considered finance to be a central concern. The second section examines how financial capital has been analyzed in the urban redevelopment literature since the pioneering work of David Harvey in the 1970s. The final section examines how financialization has played out in the medium‐sized port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Drawing on interviews with financiers and property developments, as well as secondary research materials, the study describes how a recent urban design process in Halifax enlisted urban images and ideas to rewrite development regulations, eliminate popular political involvement in the development approvals process, and lever open the downtown landscape to the whims of worldwide financial markets. The essay concludes that studies of urban redevelopment would indeed gain something by engaging with the financialization literature, so long as the former continue to attend not just to financial capital but also to the material and ideological mechanisms through which property is continually reproduced as a financial asset.

Calatrava in Athens. The architect as financier and the iconic city

“…This belief that advanced technologies would provide a better future, and "better quality of life for city dwellers" was the fundamental error of the modern movement, as documented by Jane Jacobs in the historic failure of the urban renewal movement (Jacobs, 1961) then, and today, the actual future that was the target of twentieth century modernist ideology -with the most dire urban conditions that are a reality for the majority of the world today. If in the 1960s the critique was about the destruction of the traditional city through urban renewal and the razing of built fabric, today, it is clear, that money and capitalism are irrevocably destroying the contemporary city as economists and theorists are currently debating (Byrne, 2016;Goldman, 2011Goldman, , 2015Guironnet & Halbert, 2014;Halbert & Attuyer, 2016;Harvey, 2001;Moreno, 2014;Rutland, 2010;Smyth & Gittelsohn, 2013). Calatrava's style does not fit into any of the iconic typologies I have described previously (Brott, 2017).…”

Vol. 2 n. 1 | 2017 | FULL ISSUE

“…This belief that advanced technologies would provide a better future, and "better quality of life for city dwellers" was the fundamental error of the modern movement, as documented by Jane Jacobs in the historic failure of the urban renewal movement (Jacobs, 1961) then, and today, the actual future that was the target of twentieth century modernist ideology -with the most dire urban conditions that are a reality for the majority of the world today. If in the 1960s the critique was about the destruction of the traditional city through urban renewal and the razing of built fabric, today, it is clear, that money and capitalism are irrevocably destroying the contemporary city as economists and theorists are currently debating (Byrne, 2016;Goldman, 2011Goldman, , 2015Guironnet & Halbert, 2014;Halbert & Attuyer, 2016;Harvey, 2001;Moreno, 2014;Rutland, 2010;Smyth & Gittelsohn, 2013). Calatrava's style does not fit into any of the iconic typologies I have described previously (Brott, 2017).…”

Extracting rents through foreclosures: The rescue of Catalunya Banc as a new urban strategy following the burst of the Spanish bubble

“…In this sense, the Spanish model (López & Rodríguez 2011) has been based on the continuous revaluing of real estate and on the demand for owner-occupied housing based on widespread indebtedness (Gutiérrez & Delclòs 2016;Gutiérrez & Domènech 2017a). In other words, during the years of the real estate boom, the Spanish model of accumulation was based mainly on the financialization of the built environment (Aalbers 2008;Rutland 2010) via specialization in the secondary capital circuit and an extension of the practice of savings banks providing cheap credit (Coq-Huelva 2013). This model of accumulation had its origins in housing policies promoted during the Francoist period and became fully consolidated when Spain joined the EU in the 1980s.…”