Real Estate and Global Urban History

This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology possession.

Alexia Yates (Author)

9781108797115, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 August 2021

75 pages
23 x 15 x 0.5 cm, 0.14 kg

Capitalist private property in land and buildings – real estate – is the ground of modern cities, materially, politically, and economically. It 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. This Element 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. This combination of territorial embeddedness with more wide-ranging institutional relationships charts a route to an urban history that allows the city to speak as a global agent and artefact without dispensing with the role of states and local circumstance.

1. Introduction: The Case for Real Estate
2. Real Estate and the Historiography of the City
3. Urban Theory, Through the Real Estate Lens
4. The Fleeting and the Fixed Global Urban Histories of Markets and Land
5. Conclusion
6. References.

Subject Areas: Urban & municipal planning [RPC], Property & real estate [KFFR], Urban economics [KCU]