“Two of My Shops Have Collapsed…”

Abstract

According to David Harvey, urbanisation is a process which, driven by reckless investors, first and foremost is geared towards the constant absorption of surplus capital. Based upon the analysis of both literary and archaeological sources, this chapter tries to identify and model the nature and scale of what Harvey calls “predatory urban practices” for late republican Italy. Here, we do not find many of Harvey’s upstart investors but first and foremost the members of local, landowning elites who were not only interested in financial but also in social capital. Euergetism and conspicuous spending played a key role in their investments; and building projects were high up the list of prestigious donations. Both monumental and vernacular construction projects needed and attracted a large workforce, while at the same time constantly refining the implementation of specific building technologies, modes of property management, and patterns of consumption. By looking at specific data and case studies from Rome and Pompeii, this chapter focuses on the proliferation of dedicated spaces for production, retail, and rental accommodation, commonly subsumed under the term tabernae. Through parametric modelling, it becomes clear that rent taking from urban real estate was not only a side-business for late republican investors, but from the later second century BCE onwards it constituted a major sector of the urban economy in densely populated areas. The expected revenue from tabernae and lodgings led to large-scale projects of demolition and construction, mainly driven by the members of local elite families and senatorial absentee landlords such as Cicero. As in Harvey’s concept of urban predation, it was highly lucrative for late republican property owners to pump capital into property development. This business model transformed the landed municipal elite, the domi nobiles of central Italy, into a group of urban investors whose wealth relied to similar degrees on the production of cash crops and urban real estate.