Financialization,Urban Governance and the Planning System: Utilizing ‘Development Viability’ as a Policy Narrative for the Liberalization of Ireland's Post‐Crash Planning System

Drawing upon the Irish case, this article explores the interaction between the financialized economy and the urban planning system. While considerable scholarship has examined the financialization of real estate, it remains unclear how planning systems are being repurposed to facilitate a finance‐led regime of urban growth or how the ‘real estate–financial complex’ seeks to enact planning policy transformations that support its interests. This article explores how such actors have advanced the concept of ‘financial viability of development’ as a means of influencing the post‐crisis re‐regulation of Irish planning policy. This group has argued that housing construction in post‐crash Ireland is unviable given the high development finance costs, onerous planning gain contributions and the lack of development certainty in the planning process. As such, housing construction has been at an all‐time‐low, leading to a new crisis in affordable housing provision. In response, a complicit state has further liberalized the planning system, introducing an array of policies that are evermore facilitative of development interests. Empirical findings, based on interviews with developers, lobbyists and planners, emphasize the importance of informal access to policymakers, the wielding of ‘expert knowledge’ and media management to co‐opt the state into adopting financial viability within planning policymaking.     

Debating the State in Private Housing Neighborhoods: The Governance of Homeowners' Associations in Urban Shanghai

This article examines the transformation of state power in urban China by investigating how the state governs a newly emerging type of neighborhood organization connected with housing privatization, the homeowners' association (HA). Based on a series of extensive field research visits in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012, it analyzes the contradictory rationales behind HA policies in Shanghai, and elaborates the debates between state actors and non‐state actors on the boundary of state intervention. It finds that the state in Shanghai has engaged multiple goals in its governance of the HAs: regularizing the real estate market, promoting self‐organization at the neighborhood level, and channeling homeowners' participation in urban politics. The neoliberal rationality of governing through subjects' autonomy and a tradition of the socialist discourse on party leadership co‐exist in the state's toolkit for governance. But the state's capacity to coordinate these different governing techniques varies across fields. I highlight the dilemma a non‐liberal state confronts in cultivating self‐organizing and self‐responsible individuals. This contrasts with some of the studies on ‘China's neoliberal state’, which argue that the bureaucratic system has been resilient in coping with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism.     

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.     

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.     

‘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.     

Residents’ Responses to ‘Territorial Stigmatization’: Visual Research in Berlin

This article deals with the symbolic dimension of the transformation process in a post‐socialist large‐scale housing estate in Berlin after reunification. This reflection is based on the concept of ‘territorial stigmatization’ and I use a photographic method to analyse the representational strategies employed by residents to manage territorial stigma: identifying with depoliticized images of the past, exiting the estate and questioning the very principle of representation. The first two strategies seem to be different ways of internalizing dominant representations of place. The latter differs from the first two in its use of iconic means to challenge the current spatial order and its opening up of possibilities for emancipation. The article thus also shows how photography as a research method can reflect on existing power relations.     

How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood

When working‐class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people's relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in‐depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.     

How Subordinate Financialization Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw's Służewiec Business District

This article studies the development of Warsaw's S?u?ewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic ‘de‐contextualized’ growth was shaped by Poland's semi‐peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand—enabling a process of subordinate financialization—and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post‐socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate—and office development in particular—is a crucial domain in which contemporary core–periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital—the product of financialization in the core. The case of S?u?ewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics (fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist‐time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places.     

Contested Development: Homeless Property,Police Reform,and Resistance in Skid Row,LA

Since the late 1990s, Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row has undergone private and state‐sanctioned policing practices within the fifty‐block neighborhood. These policing practices are fueled by increased commercial and real‐estate development to dispossess and contain the mostly Black homeless and housed residents. Grassroots organizations and residents have responded to gentrification‐induced policing by claiming a homeless right to property, transforming neighborhood politics. This article examines these neighborhood politics as a process of contested development. Contested development reveals the push‐and‐pull contradictions that occur when spatial difference is challenged and reproduced. Through the sphere of urban property, the contested development of property in Skid Row restores or resists the generation of spatial difference. In so doing, the claims of homeless residents and grassroots organizations to a right to property engender transformative police reforms while at the same time igniting revanchist policing methods.     

居住用地价格高涨的负面影响

近年来城镇居住用地价格持续高涨给地方政府带来可观收入,但其引发的弊端广泛而深远,包括助长房价高涨和贫富分化、地产投机与土地闲置、城镇化战略受阻与区域竞争力下降、虚拟经济膨胀和金融风险加大、政府行为扭曲和公共形象受损等五个方面。充分认识这些弊端的消极影响,是以科学发展观为指导,调整房地产调控思路的必要前提。     

房地产企业财务危机防范策略研究

房地产企业存在的财务危机隐患已成为很多房地产企业生存发展迫切需要解决的现实问题。本文具体分析了房地产企业财务危机产生的主要原因,提出防范房地产企业财务危机应从资金管理模式、财务风险组合、融资方式、把握项目不同生命周期中财务危机特点、建立企业财务危机预警系统几个方面加以解决,促进我国房地产企业获得长期经济效益和得到稳定健康发展。     

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.     

Conflict and Commensuration: Contested Market Making in India's Private Real Estate Development Sector

Newly constructed high‐rise housing and malls, soaring land prices and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway in India today. Having secured an expanded role in urban development from the state, the private sector helps to shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development in India or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary ‘private sector’. This article sheds light on private sector real estate industry members' efforts to develop an internationally familiar real estate market in India. Foreign investors and consultants have been collaborating with Indian real estate developers, who are now active intermediaries in the flow of capital into India. Drawing on participant observation and data from interviews, this article finds, however, that foreign financiers and Indian developers struggle to form partnerships on account of differences on issues like land valuation. The outcome of such conflicts will define the contours of Indian real estate development and its integration with international markets in the future.     

房地产企业财务风险分析与对策

进入上世纪90年代以来,随着我国经济的高速发展,全国各地出现了“房地产热”。我国不少房地产企业资产负债率极高,房地产企业承受着巨大的财务风险。存在的财务风险隐患已成为很多房地产企业生存发展迫切需要解决的现实问题。本文对房地产企业财务风险进行了多方面分析,并提出了房地产企业财务风险管理的一些措施。     

基于多级模糊综合评价法的房地产企业财务预警研究

随着国内经济形势的不断变化和国家房地产相关政策的出台,房地产企业在经营中各种不确定因素不断增加,财务风险也与日俱增。房地产企业的财务风险具有模糊性和复杂性,它受到财务和非财务等多种因素的影响。以财务指标为变量建立的预警模型无法全面预测企业的财务风险。为提高财务预警系统的有效性,本文以房地产企业这一微观群体为视角,在以财务指标为主体的财务预警系统基础上,结合房地产企业的特征选取非财务指标,对影响房地产企业财务预警的非财务指标进行分层研究,运用多级模糊综合评价法构建房地产企业的财务预警模型。这将对房地产企业构建财务预警体系大有裨益。     

Urban Responses to The Economic Crisis: Confirmation of Urban Policies as Crisis Management in Malmö

It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the Swedish city of Malmö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real‐estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as social relations, with the aim of going beyond traditional formulations that oppose market (neoliberal) and state intervention (Keynesianism) as the main focus for crisis management. Against this background, the article shows that the 2008 crisis was met in Malmö by an active municipality that confirmed the existing visions and tendencies, rather than exploiting the crisis as a moment for changes and transformation. The article seeks to explain this by looking at the social relations that have constituted the urban policies in Malmö for the past two decades.     

我国房地产行业上市公司的财务报表分析——以万科地产和保利地产为例

我国房地产行业在急剧发展后,迎来了首次低潮。作为关系民生的重要行业,房地产公司的财务报表分析尤为重要。文中通过对万科地产和保利地产两个房地产巨头2009~2011年的财务报表进行比率分析和比较分析,解读财务报表传递的信息,发现该行业目前发展的现状,为信息使用者提供决策有用性指导。     

后金融危机条件下我国房地产证券化研究\n——基于美国房地产证券化实践的启示

我国房地产市场发展过程中现存问题的背后是房地产金融市场风险.美国的房地产资产证券化历程从正反两方面都给中国寻找有效控制和分散风险的方法及中国房地产金融创新等提供了很好的借鉴和启示.我国房地产金融市场建设总体上应遵循"长短结合,疏堵并举"的原则.短期有"堵"有"疏";长期以"疏"为主.     

我国新一轮房地产调控的市场效应和未来走势

2006年是我国房地产宏观调控政策出台最多和调控力度最大的一年，本文就调控后的房地产业的政策环境、市场情况、价格走势和消费心态等进行了深入的研究，并对2007年我国房地产走势进行了相关分析。