Real Estate Speculation Research Articles

Urban free spaces: possibilities and potentialities along the Biriguizinho Stream in Birigui-SP

Free public spaces are elements of vital importance in the social and spatial constitution of the urban landscape. This theme has been addressed by several publications on the construction of the urban environment, especially regarding the design and use of spaces. With factors such as gentrification and real estate speculation driven by the prioritization of the economy, social segregation and the so-called urban voids have become increasingly visible. Every city needs a relationship between full and empty spaces, but the so-called urban voids are places of no use and eventually become devalued, unused, and neglected. The history of the city of Birigui, located in the state of São Paulo, was marked by the passage of the Noroeste do Brasil Railroad. The town expanded into the valley of the Biriguizinho stream, presenting an improper occupation of its banks, especially in the second half of the 20th century. Without adequate planning, the city was divided into regions with well-defined uses (without multifunctionality), which culminated in the so-called urban voids, spaces with potential but without value. This paper aims to identify the free spaces on the banks of the Biriguizinho Stream that lies in the city of Birigui-SP, looking for traces of historical layers that overlap and compose the city, and verifying the possibilities and potentialities to form a system.

Navigating Waves of Capital and History: On Speculation and Submersion in Delany

ABSTRACT: This essay reads two texts by Samuel R. Delany— Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and “Atlantis: Model 1924”—that prominently thematize spontaneous queer encounter and the financialized production of urban space. It explores the writerly practices that open up the subjective space of sexual cultures threatened and eroded by the impersonal forces of capital, highlighting in particular the use of speculative play in “Atlantis,” to suggest it serves as a model for an sf relation to history. In making sense of the contingent conditions lending urgency to Delany’s generic intervention, the essay situates Delany’s writings within the US systemic cycle of capital accumulation, noting the distinct mechanisms of financialized real estate speculation and attendant gentrification that serve to enforce property relations and sexual norms in New York.

Knowledge Actors Engaging in “Everyday Planning” in Rapidly Urbanizing Peripheries of the Global South

This article presents original research based on the premise that inclusive urban planning is about different types of knowledges coming together, a process that enables the participation of diverse knowledge actors. In India, the urgency of peri‐urbanization is reflected in the massive transformation and roaring real estate speculation that is being unleashed through the conversion of agricultural land into profit‐making urban zones. It is the praxeology of an everyday planning modality by actors that interpret the possibility of real estate speculation at different scales that drive the rapid emergence of the peri‐urban built environment around the metropolis of Bangalore in Southern India. At the outset, I present a conceptual framework that articulates territorial‐financial mechanisms at the macro‐level with the praxiology of planning actors and their networks at the meso‐level through spatial knowledges. Then I describe the methods used. In the empirical part, this article first describes a particular site at the periphery of the city of Bangalore. Then, I delineate the prescriptive knowledge given by the local planning law. I present the praxiology of the different knowledge actors that explain the modality of peri‐urbanization, followed by a discussion of the rationales of the actors that shape everyday practices of planning. Finally, I discuss how social workers could get more involved in the urban planning process and contribute to shaping more inclusive cities because of the profession’s grounding in principles and ethics that supports human well‐being and development in cities for people and not for profit.

Systemic analysis of the coastal landscape of Camocim-CE

The Coastal Zone of Brazil is characterized by its extension and diversity. Presenting a great diversity of coastal ecosystems, where sandy beaches and extensive dunes predominate. The dune areas are being increasingly occupied by developments such as hotels, inns and subdivisions, just a few meters from the beach. In this way, the general objective of this work is to present the dynamic and systemic processes that involve changes in the landscape of dunes in the municipality of Camocim-Ceará. To carry out this research, first, a survey of bibliographic and cartographic materials was carried out, in a second moment, field work was carried out. The research results showed that real estate speculation on dune areas provoke environmental imbalances in the dynamics of dune features. One of the possible impacts will be the blockage of sediment flows from the dune field. In view of the research carried out, it was evident that the dunes, as they form dynamic and systemic natural landscapes, can change quickly through man's interventions on the natural physical environment, which is common in the coastal areas of the State of Ceará. For this reason, it is necessary to have a use and occupation policy, such as environmental studies, inspection and legal regulation.

Sport mega-event fantasies to financialization: the case of Porto Maravilha.

This paper examines the relationship between sport mega-event construction and the financialization of housing in Rio de Janeiro. It focuses on the area of Porto Maravilha, constructed prior to the 2016 Olympic Games, and the particular use of the 2001 federal Statute of City and 1995 Strategic Plan for Rio de Janeiro to create new possibilities for neoliberal-capitalist expansion, initially disguised as democratized access to land yet, in effect, further commoditized land into a form of fictitious capital. To do so, we follow the work of Brazilian architect and author, Raquel Rolnik, and her argument that the legal-institutional emphasis on wealth distribution in urban legislation, propagated at the time of the internationally recognized sport mega-event in Brazil, was not adequately harnessed and instead used to endorse real estate speculation and uneven development in the metropolitan area. The coordination and collaboration between state and nonstate entities in mega-event construction is typically associated with deepened socio-spatial inequities, the privatization of public resource material, and the in/direct displacement of low-income communities. We review pertinent literature to better understand the role of sport mega-event fantasies in the construction of Porto Maravilha-which we come to understand as a speculative logic lubricant for finance. We do this to call attention to future studies to be particularly attuned to financialization in mega-event cities.

University as real estate developer: Comparative perspectives from the Global East

By examining comparatively two recent projects of university-led large-scale real estate development in South Korea and Singapore, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to problematise the methodological statism in the study of East Asian urbanisation, i.e., understanding it as a process dominated by state actors, on the one hand, and to challenge the perspective that university-led real estate projects are a neoliberal strategy as conventionally understood in the West on the other. To this end, this paper uses qualitative research methods to investigate how and why East Asian universities participate in real estate development projects; how the universities pursue their material goals by negotiating with the state, which is known to have led condensed urbanisation and industrialisation in East Asia (Global East). This paper concludes that speculative real estate development activities of East Asian universities are variegated based on their developmental legacies and need to be understood as more nuanced processes. The case studies demonstrate that East Asian universities have worked beyond their social roles by directly participating in the urban process, pursuing the accumulation of real estate assets that would eventually undermine their public role as educational institutions.

Legacies and impacts of sports mega-events in Brazil: São Paulo as a host city for football matches

Football is an integral part of Brazil’s historical-cultural process, and tourism represents one of the segments deeply impacted by the occurrence of sporting mega-events. The present study aims to present and critically reflect on the main legacies and impacts that these events brought to the Brazilian population. This paper is based on notes surrounding the legacies put forward for the city of São Paulo. To do this, information gathering lends to suggestions that help situate future planning and organization. The purpose of this paper concerns sociocultural and economic futures and the role of tourism and events for local communities based on the current realities and challenges in Brazil. The article is based on a qualitative approach, where descriptive and explanatory information is triangulated. This study utilizes a range of methods, employing a combination of bibliographic research, documentary analysis, and content analysis to frame the base of the research. Moreover, we use field research techniques such as semi-structured interviews with managers, questionnaires administered to residents, interviews with local representatives, direct observation, and active participation in events held at the main stadium associated with sport mega-events in São Paulo, namely, the Neo Química Arena. Noteworthy findings demonstrate a discrepancy between the objectives pursued by host city planners, who strive to maximize the positive legacies encompassing local infrastructure, stadiums, and the city’s image, and the experiences reported by local residents, who have encountered negative impacts and legacies resulting from the same sport mega-event. These adverse effects include issues such as flooding, gentrification, exclusion from decision-making processes, and real estate speculation. Stadiums are considered the greatest tangible legacies of sport mega-events, although their construction and maintenance costs are questionable. The participation of local residents seems to be essential in the promotion, knowledge, appropriation, belonging, support, and transparency in all phases of the mega-event planning.

“I am not by any stretch a gardener, just curious”: Feminist Gentrifier Memoirs and an Ethics of Urban Gardening

Even though the texts that this article refers to as “feminist gentrifier memoirs” are not exclusively examples of garden writing, their feminist writers’ gardening practices feature prominently to explore their conflicted position in a gentrifying neighborhood and the networks of care that form out of neighborly interactions over the garden. Drawing on urban studies in the social sciences and humanities, literary studies, and environmental humanities, the article turns to Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Gentrifier (2021) and Vikki Warner’s Tenemental (2018) as prominent engagements with the complex emotions caused by their writers’ white privilege, homeownership, and complicity in processes of displacement and real estate speculation. These texts employ modes and affordances of garden writing, feminist memoir, urban memoir, and gentrification fiction. The article further considers the ways they are influenced by the activism of community gardening and benefit from sustainability measures of cities, including urban farms and gardens (summarized under the keywords green or environmental gentrification).

A Street-Level View of the World-City: John Lanchester’s London in Capital (2012)

In his choral novel Capital (2012), John Lanchester charts the intersecting trajectories of the residents of Pepys Road, an ordinary-looking street of South London, even as the 2008 financial crisis hits. More than the spectacular crumbling of global finance, this realist novel focuses on the property boom which heralded it. This paper contends that this street-level view of one of the centres of the world-system, which contrasts with dystopian, gothic and apocalyptic literary imaginations of London, enables the author to encode the most insidious effects of global capitalism on urban life, and the ways in which real estate speculation fundamentally disrupts the social fabric of the city. This downscaled narrative of contemporary London, which foregrounds houses as central characters, thus does not emphasise the collective ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai) but the divorce of space from affect and the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a common space, thus suggesting the splintering of London into ‘fortified fragments’ (Harvey), in other words, the suburbanisation of the world-city.

Multilingualism, diversity, and performing arts. A home for Spanish language theatre in post-Brexit gentrified London

ABSTRACT In 2016, the Spanish Theatre Company (STC) opened the doors of its Cervantes Theatre (CT), the first British (and European) venue devoted to showcasing productions of Spanish and Latin American plays in a bilingual format. Four years on – and at a critical juncture given Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – this article reflects on the current state and future prospects of this nascent migrant theatre initiative based in Southwark. This, I hope, will serve as a first step to re-think the Arts Council England's diversity strategies in relation to multilingual initiatives. Drawing on in-depth interviews and critical analysis of archival and online documents, I focus on four interrelated factors crucial for understanding how and why this unique project sprung into life in a London hotspot for real estate speculation just as the UK split from the EU, with the aim of exploring if the STC case could be used as a model for future endeavours.

Dispersed urban development and the formation of urban voids in Bauru (SP) in the second half of the 20th century

This paper examines the urbanization process in the municipality of Bauru (SP), focusing the analysis on the phenomenon of urban voids and taking as a time frame the second half of the 20th century. Urban voids are urban remainders, idle or underutilized areas, products of urban dispersion and real estate speculation that enhance the discontinuous, dispersed, fragmented and sparse urbanization, a pattern that has also come to characterize medium-sized cities in São Paulo. Based on the general characterization of Brazilian urbanization in this period, the preliminary analysis of the study object allows us to infer that, in Bauru, at the peak of the development cycle in Brazil, the dissemination of urban voids is directly related, on the one hand, to the action of the real estate market and, on the other hand, to the permissiveness of urban planning and the incentives provided by public authorities, including the significant state provision of housing on the fringes of the urban territory.

Bodies in Transit: Speculation and the Biopolitical Imaginary

This essay explores the Bodies in Transit archive, an artifact of mid-nineteenth-century public health administration in New York City. The ledgers, which tracked the transit of every corpse that moved through the island of Manhattan between 1859 and 1894 and categorized entrants by their cause of death, nationality, and occupation, present a unique lens through which I explore the intersections of speculation, biopolitics, and urban space. I first establish a conceptual framework of "speculation" by dissecting its etymological genealogy, the roots of which share a preoccupation with vision and sight. I note that in practice, the abstracting and rationalizing tendencies of speculation operate by envisioning, calculating, and coercing specific outcomes into realization. I apply this framework to Bodies in Transit to historicize the ways in which biopolitics, the means through which the state forms, represents, and manages populations, are indexed to speculative economic practices. I read Bodies in Transit through the framework of speculation to articulate a field of meaning that illuminates the complex material and epistemic conditions surrounding its implementation and utility. As I argue, the ledgers were a response to the acceleration of real estate speculation in Manhattan, a trend that incentivized property owners to disinter burial grounds to relocate corpses to rural areas, and thereby connected the speculative logics of real estate to those of public health, spatial order, and surveillance. By thinking across and through the layered meanings of "speculation," this essay illuminates how the state's economy of knowledge is intimately related to biopolitical practices of surveillance and abstract representations of financial value in the modern city.

Traditional Communities, Development, and the Commons: Movements by Collectors of Wild Fruits in Northeastern Brazil

This article focuses on the experience of Mangaba Collectors in the state of Sergipe in northeastern Brazil to investigate problems faced today by traditional communities living in the commons. The way of life of Mangaba Collectors has been modified because of real estate speculation and the extensive cultivation of crops in their traditional territories of extraction. This community has thus been forced to organize politically and create partnership networks in civil society and the scientific community to address the crisis. However, the opportunity to sell products made from Mangaba in the consumer market created ambiguity within the movement, with some seeking to maintain the logic of the commons and others seeking to expand insertion into the market.

Interpretaciones y usos de la belleza del abandono en la arquitectura urbana- un análisis crítico en el caso de Oporto

By way of an essay, we propose to analyse the city of Porto through the application of a neologism related to urban architecture: the beauty of aban-donment. This concept refers to the use of aes-thetic decay as a tool to highlight public space and create an evocative urban landscape. However, the tourist attraction generated by this aesthetic poses challenges in cities such as Porto, as the valorisa-tion of abandoned infrastructures attracts tourist and commercial investments, which paradoxically leads to their rehabilitation. The phenomenon of the beauty of abandonment has different interpre-tations and uses in different cities. Some use it as a resource to enhance public space and give value to the urban context, while others see it as part of a public policy of detachment. In the case of Porto, visual collapse is part of everyday life and becomes a tourist attraction, but the city is also undergoing a process of recovering some of the beauty of abandonment. This involves the activa-tion of its economic value and real estate specu-lation. However, this process of recovery and val-orisation entails the gentrification of the city and affects both the most connected areas and Porto as a whole.

QUANTO VALE UM SAMBA? GENTRIFICAÇÃO E ESPECULAÇÃO IMOBILIÁRIA EM UM BAIRRO DO RIO DE JANEIRO

This article analyzes the entrepreneurship and gentrification process of urban areas under the logic of the city as a commodity, taking the neighborhood of Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro-RJ, as an investigative parameter. Despite the rhetoric that justifies large public and private projects, anchored in socioeconomic development and promoting the well-being of the local population, the negative social impact of these projects will be considered. In this way, we are interested in both the more objective aspects, such as the process that unites the authoritarian requalification of cultural assets with real estate speculation, and its impact on the neighborhood's sociability, considering, above all, the repositioning of local identity in the face of the interpellations of the logic of gentrification and the entrepreneurial valorization of urban space.

Bee Diversity in an Peri-Urban Patch of “Restinga”

Bees gather food resources from angiosperm flowers, promoting pollination, cross-breeding, and increasing the genetic variability of many plant species. However, all over the world there has been a great decline in bee populations, with the most accepted hypotheses being the loss of habitat caused by urbanization, fungal contamination and pesticide residues. The collapse of bee colonies can unbalance ecosystems causing a reduction in plant abundance and directly impacting the agricultural economy. Peri-urban paths are considered refuges capable of sheltering part of the biodiversity, including communities of pollinators such as bees. On the Brazilian Atlantic coast, restinga ecosystems are fragmented and their remnants are threatened by anthropic actions and real estate speculation. In this work, the bee fauna was inventoried in a peri-urban patch of “restinga” in the Municipal Natural Park of Barreto’s Restinga in Macaé, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with the objective of understanding the structure of the bee community and its relationship with the availability of floral resources and seasonality. Collections were carried out monthly between February 2019 and February 2020. The methods included active collections with entomological nets between 08:00 and 17:00 hours. 363 individuals belonging to 31 bee species were sampled. The most abundant genera were Xylocopa, Eulaema and Eufriesia, with the highest richness and abundance during the summer. There was a significant relationship between the availability of floral resources and the richness and abundance of bees. There was also a positive relationship between bee richness and rainfall. The data generated may contribute to support public policies that ensure the maintenance and expansion of “restinga” areas in urban environments, contributing to the conservation of bee species in the Atlantic Forest.

How Much Did Pandemic Uncertainty Affect Real-Estate Speculation? Evidence from On-Market Valuation of For-Sale Versus Rental Properties

How Much Did Pandemic Uncertainty Affect Real-Estate Speculation? Evidence from On-Market Valuation of For-Sale Versus Rental Properties

The production of urban space in the contemporary city and its resulting urban phenomena

The article aims to discuss the production and reproduction of urban space, demonstrating how these socio-spatial dynamics occur and that urban phenomena can occur on consolidated land. Contemporary medium-sized cities undergo growing urbanization and among these occurrences generate segregation, a spreading out, gentrification and witness both land and real estate speculation. Most of these occur as a function of capital or with some kind of intervention by it. It seeks to demonstrate how the production of urban space takes place and which agents are involved in it, in addition to looking at what the relationship between them is: namely capitalist social relations and relations of production. Urban land is a product considered a commodity, and this is the object of a struggle between social classes for access to land. Urban space, considered central and endowed with infrastructure, is, in most cases, appropriated by those who have the greatest amount of capital, leaving the lower social strata with less purchasing power to purchase in peripheral areas often with little or no infrastructure. The methodology used was exploratory with a qualitative approach, with reference to authors with scientific mastery of the subject.

부동산 관련 지방세제의 문제점과 개선방안

A local tax system is established as a taxation system that takes into account the price function for local government work and public services and the revitalization of the local economy. To strengthen the financial independence of local governments, there is a need to expand the fiscal decentralization and the size of local governments' own financial resources.
 The tax revenue from local government finances is composed mainly of local taxes, local nontax revenue, state subsidies, local grants, and local grant tax and other income. Much of the local tax is centered on property transaction tax, thereby being characterized by being closely related to the real estate business.
 A flow of real estate taxation imposes a heavy tax on multiple homeowners, thereby leading to pressuring selling as a measure to prevent a price from rising due to the lack of supply. This tax policy is functioning as a means of stabilizing the property prices and transactions by regulating real estate speculation, not the financing method that is the original purpose of the tax.
 Owing to a difference in economic conditions between regions, the inequality of local government's fiscal power poses another level of a problem. The problem of income disparity between regions makes it a rule to be dealt with at the level of national redistribution policy with the support from the central government. However, the income gap between regions can be resolved through the industrial policy or the balanced national development.

Maputo, the divided city: fragmentation and (re)qualification

Maputo - the Mozambican capital - has expanded itself vertiginously in the midst of the late independence process (1975). Its population has been multiplied about twelve times during the decades from 1950 to 2020, reaching more than 1.1 million inhabitants. The political, commercial, and financial center of the country, the urban fabric of the capital is the stage for complex processes of economic growth and spatial segregation triggered in recent decades. The central region, known locally as the "cement city", concentrates on modern and widely diversified infrastructures. Squares and parks, luxury condos surrounded by modern offices, international standard hotels, shopping, and a set of pharaonic constructions - built at a cost of billions - set the landscape tone of progress induced and concentrated in favor of a small elite. However, beyond this "stronghold", around 92% of the population lives in the peripheral part of Maputo, popularly known as the "reed city". These, however, are located in very precarious housing, produced informally by the residents themselves, and subjected to the complete absence of infrastructure and public services. These issues contribute directly to the fact that Mozambique has the ninth-worst Human Development Index (HDI) on the planet. In this way, the present article - elaborated from fieldwork, interdisciplinary discussions and dialogues undertaken within the scope of an international scientific project between universities in Brazil and Mozambique - seeks to present and interpret the set of urban connections that make Maputo a fragmented and complex city, full of continuous socio-territorial transformations in which multiple clashes emerge linked to segregation, gentrification, real estate speculation, among others.