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.