The Real Estate Frontier

Africa's major cities are experiencing dramatic transformation as a result of growing real estate investment. This article explores whether existing theories can explain the dynamics of urban redevelopment in an African context, and how African cases can inform new theorizations of real estate driven urban transformation. Examining the utility of theories of gentrification and speculative urbanism for understanding urban redevelopment in Accra, Ghana, it argues that urban redevelopment in this city has been shaped by its particular (post)colonial history of state land acquisition and urban planning. Rather than simply identifying empirical variation on established theories, however, the article draws on recent research on commodity frontiers to propose an original theorization of urban redevelopment in Accra in terms of the production of a ‘real estate frontier’. This real estate frontier is characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city. The article concludes by calling for a comparative research agenda to better understand real estate frontiers globally.     

Space Grabs: Colonizing the Vertical City

Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega-city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high-rises in both central cities and peri-urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid-2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.     

‘Asset Price Urbanism’ and Financialization after the Crisis: Ireland's National Asset Management Agency

The impact of the global financial crisis on cities is the subject of an important body of research. One aspect which has received surprisingly little attention is the urban dimension of government interventions in the financial sector, particularly given the integration of finance and real estate is widely understood as a key driver of the crisis. This article examines one such intervention, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a ‘bad bank' established by the Irish government to acquire and manage ‘toxic' real estate loans from the banking sector. Although envisaged as an intervention in the financial sector, the relationship between finance and real estate is such that the agency has a significant impact on urban development and, at the same time, that the management of urban space plays a key role in resolving the financial crisis and restoring the flow of credit in the economy. The article develops the concept of ‘asset price urbanism' to capture the way in which urban space and its relationship to finance is managed to bolster the relationship between real estate and credit, and theorizes this as a significant aspect of contemporary accumulation. The article thus makes an empirically grounded conceptual contribution to literature on the urban dimension of financialization.     

Recombinant Urbanization: Agrarian–urban Landed Property and Uneven Development in India

This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land‐based caste/class relations shape the production of post‐liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste‐based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents’ entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.     

The Henry George Theorem and the Entrepreneurial Process: Turning Henry George on his Head

This chapter offers an interpretation of the Henry George Theorem (HGT) that brings it squarely into the study and analysis of entrepreneurship somewhat loosening its ties to the subfield of urban economics. I draw on the pioneering work of Spencer Heath whose insights about the viability of proprietary communities were developed further by his grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum who, in 1970, recognized that private real estate developers sometimes make their capital gains (mostly) by creating useful public spaces that others enjoy. I also draw inspiration from Fred Foldvary's effort in 1994 to synthesize the pubic goods problem in economics with the Henry George Theorem in urban economics. While the real estate owner—developer does emerge on my pages in a somewhat more favourable light than as originally portrayed by Henry George in his Progress and Poverty in 1879, I offer a realistic appraisal of the duplicitous behaviours required of such entrepreneurs. in the context of the modern regulatory state. Real estate development remains a 'hot button' item in local politics, and real estate developers must become genuine 'political entrepreneurs' if they are to complete their projects in a timely way and capture business profits. It is a complicated story that the HGT helps make intelligible in terms of human action.     

Diversification by Urbanization: Tracing the Property‐Finance Nexus in Dubai and the Gulf

This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial‐sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate markets and the circulation of surplus capital from oil rents to the ‘secondary circuit’ of the built environment. With an emphasis on the city of Dubai, we employ the notion of diversification by urbanization to trace the re‐regulation of real estate markets and highlight how these strategies have subsequently shaped Gulf financial markets. Through an examination of the impacts of real estate mega‐project development on local banking credit, equities and Islamic financial markets, we reframe recent urbanization in the region as a process of financial re‐engineering, and identify the emergence of capital groups whose accumulation activities are tightly connected to both the real estate and financial circuit.     

PROPERTY-LED INFORMALITY: Shifting Informal Land Development from Popular Housing to Middle-Class and Elite Speculation in Belo Horizonte

Recent decades have seen a rising interest in the peripheral nature of urbanization processes. While research has put the spotlight on large-scale, transnational and financialized real estate actors, less attention has been paid to informal land developers. Addressing that knowledge gap, this article underscores the key role of land developers in informal urbanization through a case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A mixed-methods approach provides new evidence of the widespread, variegated and spatially uneven development of irregular and clandestine subdivisions over the last two decades, revealing a heterogeneous landscape of informal developers. The study shows that informal development has been shifting from the typical popular and peripheral subdivision, which provided precarious yet affordable housing for working-class families, to new forms of speculative investment for the middle and upper classes, such as country homes and gated communities in peri-urban and rural areas. I argue that this shift is explained by both national and local changing regulatory frameworks and processes of economic restructuring, urban neoliberalism and housing financialization in the periphery. In light of this, I propose the notion of ‘property-led informality’ to refer to a regime of informal urbanization increasingly dominated by commodified, rentiership and speculative land dynamics in the sprawling metropolises of the global South.     

Returns,volatility and spillover – A paradigm shift in India?

We investigate spillovers in returns and volatility among five major financial assets in India. Spillovers account for more than 25 percent of the forecast error variance in all the five markets. Banking, real estate and gold matter the most for India. Shocks from US economy to India arrive via Gold and forex markets. Events including the general elections and demonetization were contemporaneous to major episodes of return and volatility spillovers in the analyzed assets. Demonetization policy and President Trump’s election have increased regulatory risk for the Indian IT sector outlining its importance for gold and banking sector volatility shock transmission.     

The Neoliberalization of Municipal Land Policy in Sweden

In Sweden, local governments’ practice of the ‘municipal land instrument’—that is, the use of public land ownership as a tool for facilitating urban development—has a long tradition. In the post‐war era, public land ownership constituted an important component of state‐led housing production, which had both a productive and a redistributive purpose. Departing from a political economy perspective, this article demonstrates how the redistributive aspect of the municipal land instrument has been dissolved under neoliberalization, and discusses why the use of this instrument is problematic from both a democratic and ethical point of view. Based on a case study in Helsingborg, the article argues that, in using public land to leverage private investment in urban development, local decision makers adopt an interest in supporting rent extraction from tenants and housing owners, while subsidizing investment costs for developers. The dual role that municipalities assume as landowner‐developers and planning authorities enable them to facilitate urban development effectively, but it is also problematic because it transgresses the public–private law divide inherent to Swedish law. Assuming this dual role, municipalities place themselves in a biased position that risks undermining the legitimacy of governmental actions in general, and the planning system in particular.     

魅力沈阳 完美绽放——记2012’未来城市可持续发展论坛暨第十届中国地产经济主流高峰论坛

2012年9月21日,由中国宏观经济学会低碳研究中心、中国市长协会、沈阳市人民政府指导,未来城市可持续发展论坛组委会、中国地产经济主流高峰论坛组委会、沈阳市城乡建设委员会、沈阳市沈北新区人民政府、房地产导刊社、美国交通与发展政策研究院(ITDP)主办,《房地产导刊》杂志社等承办的2012’未来城市可持续发展论坛暨第十届中国地产经济主流高峰论坛在中国辽宁沈阳友谊宾馆隆重开幕。     

LAND MARKETS AND THE EFFECT OF REGULATION ON FORMAL-SECTOR DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN INDONESIA

Until recently, urban land and housing markets in Indonesia seemed to function well. Informal-sector development provided low-income housing affordably. Through government programs, formal-sector developers could build housing for all but the poor. Since 1989, however, daily conversation pictures land speculation as rampant and formal-sector housing as rising beyond the means of the middle class. Newspapers carry stories of conflicts between small landowners and large developers with government officials in between. This article investigates this situation by addressing two related questions: are urban land prices rising “too fast?”; how do land regulations and development practices affect costs, and who pays these costs? The article includes quantitative estimates of urban land prices, changes in urban land supply, movement of land through the permitting process, and the effect of development regulations on costs. Data come from a literature survey and interviews of some of the largest formal-sector developers in Indonesia. A principal finding concerns a development regulation called a “location permit” and the “social function” of land in Indonesian law. Although helpful as a means of assembling land in Indonesia's highly fragmented land markets, location permits allow formal-sector developers to hold land off the market and pay low prices to small landowners. Ultimately, the “social function” of land under Indonesian law holds down the price formal-sector developers pay for land, but not at the price at which they sell their product. The article concludes by proposing reforms to the regulatory process.     

浅谈公共事业建设中的房地产市场发展--以近代北京学校建设为例

对城市中已有房地产的开拓和使用是近代公共事业建设的基础，对现代城市建设具有重要的启示意义。以北京学校建设为切入点，依时代顺序分别考察不同时期北京城市土地制度、房地产市场发展以及学校对房地产的使用情况。近代城市功能的演变带动了房地产市场的形成与发展，房地产市场的引入又进一步推动了近代公共事业的发展。     

Employee perceptions of performance appraisals: a comparative study on Indian banks

Performance appraisal is the most critical human resource practice and an indispensable part of every organization; however, the practice continues to generate dissatisfaction among employees and is often viewed as unfair and ineffective. Indian banking sector is one of the biggest and fastest growing financial service sectors. The post-liberalization era has witnessed significant changes in the structure and operations of banks operating in India. Arrival of new private and foreign banks has given a cause to public sector banks to be more competitive, effective and innovative in their approach. Past researches have compared public and private sector banks and have indicated that new private sector banks are outscoring public sector banks in terms of technical and economic efficiency parameters. However, no study could be found that compared public and private banks in India on fairness perceptions of performance appraisal system. Therefore, this research studied the differences between public and private sector banks with respect to perception of fairness of the performance appraisal system and performance appraisal satisfaction. Perception of fairness of the performance appraisal system has been studied through nine factors. The study used independent samples t-test and qualitative analysis to study the mean differences between the two banks. Results indicated that private sector bank employees perceive greater fairness and satisfaction with their performance appraisal system as compared to public sector bank employees.     

我国商业地产开发策略分析

深入整理分析商业地产只售不租、租售结合、只租不售、地产金融四种开发模式,认为商业地产开发商应结合自身情况灵活选用四种不同开发模式;进一步阐释商业地产开发项目精准定位的内涵。并尝试运用零售饱和指数理论解决商业地产开发项目体量确定等问题。最后利用2012年我国35个大中城市商业地产相关数据,运用因子分析的方法聚合商业地产市场规模因子、城市宏观经济因子、市场吸纳因子、市场增长因子这四个因子,并计算出35个大中城市商业地产开发潜力得分,在此基础上,建议开发商开发时注意各城市之间商业地产开发环境与开发潜力的差异。     

Impacts of Land Use Rights Reform on Urban Development in China

The opening of China's urban land market has seen a growing interest internally and internationally in land and real estate development. Due to the monopolized ownership of land, this interest brings in substantial income for the government. Because of this new source of income, governments at various levels are able to finance urban development to different extents. This paper examines the outcomes of the reform that created a market mechanism for urban land and real estate, and the correlation of urban developments with the land and real estate market.     

Three Dimensions of Capital Switching within the Real Estate Sector: A Canadian Case Study

This article analyzes capital switching practices in the real estate development sector. The leading practitioners in Canada, the Canadian‐based real estate companies, are the subject of this inquiry. The tradability and divisibility of real estate properties enhance the growing similarity between real estate properties and other financial assets. It is appropriate to talk about portable real estate portfolios because companies constantly rearrange their property composition. This article emphasizes the ‘three dimensions of capital switching’. These dimensions unpack significant corporate considerations in the deployment and redeployment of capital, namely, mode of operation, property type and location. With respect to office development, the trajectory of the major real estate companies over the last 20 years has accommodated two notable shifts. First, these companies have focused on larger and newer properties, disposing of their smaller and older assets. Second, they have funneled a growing share of their capital assets into the top‐tier cities of the Canadian urban system, reducing investment in other metropolitan areas and disinvesting in the small‐to‐medium sized cities.     

An Austrian Analysis of China's Unsustainable Boom

Austrian Business Cycle Theory can shed light on the ways in which the current Chinese economic boom is unsustainable. On the one hand, government interventions, such as land monopolies, have raised costs for real estate developers. By limiting the availability of investment instruments and access to external markets, government interventions have created a strong demand for housing as a hedging tool. On the other hand, a loose monetary policy and artificially low interest rates have made the property market tempting for developers. Over‐construction and over‐consumption in the housing sector epitomise the capital structure analysis that Austrian economists regard as the core of their business cycle theory.     

中小城市小区住宅设计的思考

中小城市因为用于开发房地产的土地面积相对较小,且通常一块地被分划给多个开发商,导致开发商在进行住宅建设过程中难以建立起设施齐备、服务完整的小区模式。因此从宏观上讲,对于中小型城市的小区住宅建设设计应尽可能整合规划、集约管理。     

Inclusionary Zoning and Exclusionary Development: The Politics of ‘Affordable Housing' in North Brooklyn

A key element of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New Housing Marketplace program has been the use of voluntary inclusionary zoning, through which private developers have been offered tax breaks and density bonuses to develop affordable housing on newly rezoned land. While this program has failed to alleviate the housing affordability crisis in New York City, little attention has been paid to its political effects on community‐based struggles over housing. This article addresses this question by examining the 2005 Greenpoint‐Williamsburg Waterfront Rezoning, which combined a voluntary inclusionary zoning program with a tenant services contract intended to mitigate the residential displacement effects of the rezoning. I critically examine its design, execution and monitoring, based on two years of work as an organizer and administrator of the tenant services contract. I argue that technologies of consent and control have reshaped the politics of housing in North Brooklyn by replacing resistance to gentrification with amelioration of its effects, through the anticipated creation of affordable housing. The upshot has been an emergent politics of housing in which real estate‐led development is regarded not as a cause of gentrification but as its solution.