Real Estate Speculation Research Articles

Resgate histórico: a arquitetura ferroviária em Videira – SC

A construção da ferrovia foi responsável pelo surgimento do município de Videira, situado no meio oeste do estado de Santa Catarina. A partir de entrevistas, estudos de referenciais teóricos e análises fotográficas, este artigo tem como objetivo analisar a arquitetura ferroviária local e traçar um comparativo do uso destas edificações entre os dias atuais e a época em que se utilizava o trem como principal meio de transporte, um período que faz parte da identidade de um país que deixou de utilizar esse modal, o que resultou em diversos espaços ociosos disponíveis a novos usos. Durante a pesquisa constatou-se que toda a estrutura, antes pertencente à Companhia Ferroviária, teve de se adaptar forçosamente a novos usos para passar de uma área degradada e em abandono a uma área frequentada pela população e de grande especulação imobiliária devido a sua posição central na cidade. Nota-se que muitos dos edifícios existentes naquele período foram demolidos ou descaracterizados para atender a usos comerciais, não tendo controle e legislação vigente à época que ponderasse estas ações. O estudo conclui que a arquitetura em questão se enquadra dentro de patrimônio industrial e cultural, tendo em vista seu antigo uso e a importância da ferrovia para a formação da cidade, e que teria sido de grande importância a maior atenção do poder público ao permitir o uso comercial nestes edifícios, essencial para a preservação deste patrimônio pertencente a história do município.

Good and Bad Squatters? Challenging Hegemonic Narratives and Advancing Anti-Capitalist Views of Squatting in Western European Cities

Mainstream mass media and politicians tend to portray squatters as civic evils. Breaking in and trespassing on private property is clumsily equated with the occupation of empty premises. Squatting is often represented as a serious criminal offence even before any legal verdict has been determined. The social diversity of squatters and the circumstances around this practice are usually omitted. Dominant narratives in Western European cities were effective in terms of criminalisation of squatting and the social groups that occupied vacant properties –homeless people in need of a shelter, those who cannot afford to buy or rent convenient venues for performing social activities, activists who squat as a means of protest against real estate speculation, etc. This article reviews the available evidence of those narratives and disentangles the main categories at play. I first examine homogenisation stereotypes of squatters as a whole. Next, I distinguish the divides created by the conventional polarisation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ squatters. It is argued that both dynamics foster the stigma of squatting and facilitate its repression, although these discursive struggles engage squatters as well. As a consequence, I discuss the implications of ‘reversive’ and ‘subversive’ narratives performed by squatters to legitimise their practices and movements. In particular, the anti-capitalist features of these counter-hegemonic responses are identified and elaborated, which adds to the topic’s literature.

Deracialized Nostalgia, reracialized community, and truncated gentrification: capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and Durban, South Africa

ABSTRACT Gentrification literature often focuses on frictions between gentrifiers (often white) and those being displaced by the process (often low-income people of color). Far less attention is paid to a revealing place-marketing strategy that papers over race politics. Businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods appeal to their customers’ sense of nostalgia for a vanished way of life, while eliding racial injustices prevalent in the times they evoke. The process entails re-racialization of such sites without reference to the segregatory politics central to their creation: a mode of remaking history, without memory. In larger cities this may not be so evident, since gentrification dynamics are driven by both a sufficiently large share of the population with high disposable incomes, and a well-developed property redevelopment industry with the capacity to unleash real estate speculation. In contrast, smaller cities that have partially gentrified still exhibit incomplete erasure of the past. They provide a valuable window into this process of historical de- and re-racialization. Two such secondary cities are Richmond, Virginia, and Durban, South Africa. Both have histories of legally-enshrined racial segregation, and both are attempting, with varying degrees of success, to recast inner-city neighborhoods as cool, creative places for middle-class residents to live, consume, and produce.

The dispute over tourist cities. Tourism gentrification in the historic Centre of Palma (Majorca, Spain)

The historic centre of Palma is undergoing significant socio-urban change due to tourism-real estate speculation—an issue that is constantly highlighted in debates on tourism gentrification. This revaluation of the historic centre as a place for investment coincided with a serious economic crisis and an increase in urban inequality throughout the city. Tourism gentrification is spreading throughout neighbourhoods in the old town, most notably in areas with high heritage value. Our aim herein is to examine tourism gentrification in the historic centre of Palma through the increase in luxury hotels and short-stay holiday home rentals, particularly those listed on Airbnb, as the two most recent agents of gentrification. The advent of social resistance to this phenomenon can be tied to the socio-urban impacts that have stemmed from this tourism speculation: financial (real estate speculation and rising property prices), social (evictions), and functional and scenic (symbolic and commercial transformation). The strongest political response has come in the recent Tourism Act (August 2017) introducing certain regulatory measures: firstly, the focus on the illegal nature of renting holiday accommodation and, secondly, tourism zoning which, in Palma, has led to a complete ban on holiday rentals in residential apartment blocks. Palma is the first city in Spain to opt for this solution.

The Making of Gangnam: Social Construction and Identity of Urban Place in South Korea

Amid a globally increasing trend of urban segregation, this article asks why a particular urban place, the Gangnam area in the city of Seoul, has come to symbolize the rich and the powerful, consolidating both socioeconomic segregation and political conservatism in a short span of time. While different approaches exist that partially explain Gangnam’s luxurious lifestyles, fervent real estate speculation, obsession with education, and political conservatism, this article seeks to provide a holistic explanation for the rise of Gangnam and draws particular attention to the social construction of place identity. Based on the analysis of historically and contextually grounded evidence, imaginations, and cognitive scaling of different stakeholders, it suggests bidirectional formations of self–other and present–future identities, highlighting the sociopsychological aspects of place identity formation. Specifically, it explains political conservatism as the attempts of Gangnam residents to sustain the area’s entrance barrier and pass on their exclusivity to future selves and children.

Economic geography, to what ends? From privilege to progressive performances of expertise

Recent Exchanges have focused on economic geography’s purported ‘decline’ and its patriarchal and generational privilege, asking ‘who speaks’ for the subdiscipline. This Exchanges piece asks another kind of existential question: what ends does economic geography serve? And how is economic geographical expertise marshalled and performed towards such ends – especially beyond the British context, where much of the debate has focused? Drawing briefly upon collaborative research experiences in Sydney, Australia, I offer thoughts on progressive contributions arising from grounded empirical research within cities subject to profound transformation from speculative real estate, and hypercharged by global finance. Amid unsolicited plans for massive rezoning of industrial spaces and accompanying displacement of manufacturing, repair and cultural industries, credible economic geographical data assisted activists and sympathetic local decisionmakers by bringing to light the significance of existing spaces of work (especially in industrially zoned land) subject to rezoning plans. Contestation over massive real estate proposals continues in Sydney, but empirical research targeted at public debate has nevertheless already shifted the narrative. While academic privilege and expert status warrants intra-disciplinary critique, what also matters is whether, how and where economic geographers deploy expertise productively towards progressive ends. Hence, critically engaged economic geography flourishes in different forms beyond the discipline's imagined ‘core’ places, even via quite ‘dry’ empirical studies that on the surface do not declare radical intents. Economic geographers are key intermediaries circulating knowledges, active agents in making concrete manifestations of the economy known. And that is a crucial point of intervention.

Do vilarejo colonial a cidade do café:

Neste artigo, propomos apreender a historicidade dos processos urbanos em curso em São Paulo na passagem do século XIX para o XX por meio de um exercício metodológico que consiste em escrever nossa caminhada pela iconografia da capital paulista, principalmente pelas imagens fotográficas que a constitui. Posto que a caminhada encerra algo que não pode ser explicado, que somente pode ser praticado, em um primeiro momento ofereceremos ao nosso leitor um percurso pela visualidade da capital paulista e, em seguida, as associações que fabricamos ao longo do percurso com o propósito de compreender como o processo de produção do território urbano, mediado pela especulação imobiliária, foi captado e mostrado pelo trabalho de fotógrafos que atuaram ou que ainda atuam em São Paulo.

ORIGEM E EXPANSÃO DAS FAVELAS NA CIDADE DO RIO DE JANEIRO: PROCESSO HISTÓRICO E CENÁRIO SOCIOAMBIENTAL

O objetivo principal do trabalho é estudar a origem e expansão das favelas do Rio de Janeiro, situação que envolve diferentes fatores entre os quais podemos enumerar a especulação imobiliária, o papel do Estado com a falta de políticas de geração de empregos e de políticas habitacionais, desenvolvimento de sistema de transportes coletivos eficientes criando a necessidade no trabalhador em procurar para sua moradia locais próximos de trabalho. A análise destas variáveis nos levará a expor a história das favelas da cidade do Rio de Janeiro desde suas origens até nossos dias.

Perceptions on Floods by the Population Residing in the Watershed of Ribeirão Garcia, Brazil

Any anthropic action transforms the environment. However, the Urbanization is a human achievement, not the “villain” or “protagonist” of passive actors and experienced environmental degradations, but the model of urban occupation, construction and densification, interconnected with the ineffectiveness of the current drainage system. When evaluating programs to minimize flood impacts, the social component is a necessary but often neglected dimension. This component can be evaluated through the articulation between the actors (population and public power) and the resident community’s perception in relation to the needs and interventions. The present work seeks to analyze the perception of the community resident in the watershed of Ribeir&#227o Garcia regarding the problems arising from urban floods. The repeated flood events occurring in the Ribeirao Garcia watershed in the city of Blumenau-SC, Brazil, make this place a potential area for an investigative process, which can subsidize future decision-making processes aimed at the adequacy of a sustainable system in medium and long term. For the accomplishment of this work, a qualitative research was adopted. Fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with residents in the sample areas have been carried out to analyse land use and occupation. The procedures that supported this sample survey were divided into four steps: definition of the total population and the sample size; preparation of a questionnaire; application of the questionnaire and tabulation of results. It can be seen that, despite the problems of floods and landslides to residents of all sample areas, the locals have different perceptions regarding the proposed issues and that these different perceptions are linked to the sample geographic location. The analysed space is full of contrasts in physical, social and economic aspects, which favours one part of the population and disfavours the other. The process of densification and overcrowding of inadequate areas has been one of the negative effects of a disorganized housing sector in a speculative real estate market, and different levels of infrastructure among the districts, consolidating, in many ways, a process of social exclusion and spatial segregation. The analysis of the resident community’s perception in the Ribeirao Garcia watershed shows that the most susceptible communities to this type of events are those of low income, located in risk areas. It also demonstrates that, despite these communities’ present empirical situation knowledge on the causes and consequences of the floods, most residents prefer to transfer responsibility only to the public power, without assuming their own responsibility. The study of community perception makes it clear that the problem has been aggravated in part by a lack of knowledge of the relationship between land use and flooding.

Impact of unfinished residential developments on municipal economic forecasts: evidence from medium-sized Spanish cities

The economic impact of each new residential development on the public budget can be very different than expected when, due to the real estate speculation, a poor demand forecast or to unexpected reasons, the dwellings are not built and occupied by their final users within the planned term. To quantify to what extent public costs and revenues are affected in unfinished developments, the economic balance of the public services operation when vacant lots, empty dwellings and dwellings with temporary occupancy are persistent in the long term has been simulated in three theoretical developments under the tax burden and operating cost of a sample of Spanish municipalities. Regardless of the local particularities, the results obtained show a clear stress to public finances when dwellings are not built, and less robust statistical results when said dwellings are built but remain empty or are occupied only temporarily. This leads to a reflection on whether the current tax system, based more on the amount of real estate properties than on their effective use, is the most appropriate for the promotion of sustainable urban patterns.

“The Greatest Agricultural Colony on Earth”: Landscape and Community Development of the Estelle Colony, Atlantic County, New Jersey, 1895–1910

ABSTRACT In 1901 the Chancery Court of New Jersey heard arguments in one of the largest property lawsuits ever held in Atlantic County. The suit, filed by the Estell Family, alleged that Philadelphia businessman Daniel Risley had failed to repay mortgages held by the Estells on thousands of acres of pinelands along the Tuckahoe River. Risley had developed the lands as the Estelle Colony. The lawsuit opened a window onto the economic decline, real estate speculation, and demographic changes transforming the landscape of the southern New Jersey Pine Barrens. As the colony's mostly immigrant residents struggled with building homes, farming the sandy pinelands soils, and filling a vacuum of governance with a unique example of a village improvement association, they transformed their landscape and crafted community identity out of hardship. The first years of their settlement present a significant story of placemaking in Philadelphia's nearest wilderness.

GOOD PRACTICES REPORT: TO UNDERSTAND URBAN DYNAMICS

The “Urban Dynamics” Project[1] is a very important propose to look for understand the urban frame from many analyses and actions scales, as much as in the more organized spaces in developed countries, as in countries in process of democracy consolidation. The urban agents - State, Real estate speculators, Landlords, Owners of means of productions and social groups - are the same all around the world, what changes are the historic and cultural characteristics, in other words what changes is the geographic address. In this way we need to understand the urban world as a totality inside of the globalization. We need to understand the contradictions and complements from the closer and specific to the more common, perceived and represented in a global scale.[1] Urban Dynamic Project – Erasmus + was a project developed by the European Union, composed by three European Universities (CAU Germany, USC Spain, UP8 France) and two Latin American Universities (USAL Argentina and UFPE Brazil, between 2015-2017).

Assessing Urban Fragmentation at Regional Scale Using Sprinkling Indexes

Artificial land use trends could represent an effective indicator of the settlement process quality and could also provide information about the efficacy of protection and exploitation policies in natural and rural areas. This work discusses an analytic procedure for the time series investigation of urban settlement development at the regional scale to verify the nexus between urban growth and demographic trends connected with the phenomenon of land take. In Italy, since 1950, the land take phenomenon has been a consequence of several factors: urbanization, realization of transport infrastructures including ports, airports, and highways, and the enhancement of industrial and productive systems. We analyzed all these territorial transformations that create waterproof soil, and more generally, a transition from natural and semi-natural uses toward artificial land use. After World War II, the demographic growth and the consequent housing demand generated a strong urbanization process in the main poles of economic development areas in Italy. Since the early 2000s, the situation has completely changed and the land take phenomenon is no longer mainly based on real need for new urban expansion areas based on effective urban planning tools, but is strongly related to a scattered demand for new housing in a weak territorial spatial planning system not able to drive effective urban development that minimizes speculative real estate initiatives. This uncontrolled occupation of soil generated, in Italy, a landscape fragmentation called the urban sprinkling phenomenon, different from urban sprawl, which is a wider phenomenon characterized by disordered urban growth. The present document aims to assess how uncontrolled expansion in areas characterized by low settlement density can generate fragmentation. To define if the territory is affected by the urban sprinkling phenomenon, two 50-year time series concerning urban expansion of buildings and demographic trends are analyzed calculating population and building density indices and their variation over the years. The sprinkling index is used to analyze the variation in the fragmentation degree at two different scales (regional and municipal). Finally, we discuss the context where this phenomenon has developed, analyzing the buildings located in hydrogeological risk zones and protected areas, and the correlation between demographic changes and the degree of territorial fragmentation variation.

Segregation in Housing and Urban Forms: An Issue of Private and Public Concern

The Mapping Public Housing investigation project (MdH), based at the University of Porto, Faculty of Architecture, Centre for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, is building a database of State-subsidized residential architecture in Portugal designed between 1910 and 1974. An ongoing survey of laws directly or indirectly influencing housing construction, and of their concretization, allows for a reading of the influence of the State in housing architecture. This paper will focus on two scopes of segregation through housing design in the Portuguese 20th century, both in private initiatives—the “Ilhas”, low rent housing built in the backyards of Porto in the first half of the century—and in public investments—using the example of the “Affordable Houses”, a housing programme created by the Portuguese dictatorial regime in 1933 in which the buyers of the houses were subjected to surveillance by the State. An ongoing context of market pressure caused by speculative real estate investing and mass tourism, suggests an evolution of the original processes of segregation into systems of gentrification, transforming the cultural and social fabric.

Sustentabilidade e turismo: uma relação em análise na praia da Pipa/RN

A presente pesquisa propõe um estudo sobre as ações de sustentabilidade presentes em um destino de turismo litorâneo consolidado no Brasil, a praia da Pipa, pertencente ao município de Tibau do Sul/RN. Tem-se como objetivo da pesquisa ‘detectar os principais projetos voltados à sustentabilidade na praia da Pipa, visando apontar alternativas para um planejamento mais sustentável do turismo’. Para isso, foram realizadas visitas in loco, observação participante, levantamento dos projetos e ações de cunho sustentável desenvolvidas na localidade. Foi possível identificar os representantes e optou-se por entrevistas semiestruturadas como instrumento para levantamento dos dados do estudo de campo, totalizando 17 investigados. Alguns projetos desempenham papel de cunho ambiental, social, cultural e educacional na praia da Pipa, contribuindo com iniciativas coletivas que visam o bem-estar e melhores condições para a comunidade. Apesar de constatar atitudes concretas de compromisso socioambiental, o destino apresenta reflexos negativos provenientes do turismo de massa, tais como: especulação imobiliária, predomínio de relações de poder, exploração de áreas naturais, exclusão dos nativos, ineficiência dos órgãos gestores e fiscalizadores. Como ações preferenciais, é essencial direcionar o planejamento turístico com metas à longo prazo, com consciência sobre os impactos futuros na destinação, voltadas efetivamente para os direcionamentos da sustentabilidade.

Review: Architecture of Appropriation

Architecture of Appropriation Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam 27 January–25 June 2017 In the 1960s, the unsanctioned occupation of empty houses, commercial properties, and industrial sites in European and American cities accompanied the rise of new, urban-centered social movements seeking to reclaim the city from corporate interests. By the 1970s, the act of squatting, or appropriating vacant buildings and terrains, became increasingly militant; it left an indelible impression on the urban landscape. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Netherlands, where squatting played an important role not only in fomenting social protest but also in creating alternative infrastructures and a sense of common urban life. While squatters have historically been fierce advocates of the right to affordable housing and resistant to speculative real estate development, their interventions in the built environment have also precipitated the gentrification of inner-city industrial areas and even the “share economy” capitalism of Airbnb and flexwork. Rather than an installation of mute objects, the exhibition Architecture of Appropriation suggested some of the squatting movement's dual legacy in the Netherlands and transformed the galleries of Het Nieuwe Instituut into a hub for ongoing research and activism. The exhibition had four major components: an installation by the firm Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS) on the exterior of the building; archival material and architectural analyses of case studies and squatting practices, housed in the institute's third-floor gallery; “pop-in” installations that dropped into the larger exhibition at different moments; and a series of public conversations, lectures, and workshops that were recorded and distributed as podcasts. The layout and graphic design of the exhibition (by ZUS and Jakub Straka, respectively) self-consciously deployed strategies of appropriation, reusing materials from previous exhibitions and the graphic identity of the institute. The clearest indication of the organizers’ interest in squatting's subversive character was the installation by …

A PRODUÇÃO DOS ESPAÇOS PÚBLICOS A PARTIR DA PERSPECTIVA DOS LARGOS DA CIDADE DE PORTO ALEGRE

Com este trabalho pretende-se refletir a produção do espaço dos largos, frente ao universo dos espaços públicos contemporâneos. A tese é a de que os espaços públicos dos largos se constituíram como redutos de apropriações alternativas. Assim, divergente da lógica das “revitalizações urbanas”, pautadas na especulação imobiliária, os largos resistiram e consolidaram uma produção do espaço de caráter popular. Além disso, o desenvolvimento do trabalho apresenta uma proposta metodológica que perpassa os conceitos norteadores da Geografia a fim de ampliar e tornar múltipla a apropriação teórica. Assim, através do conceito de paisagem, espaço, território e lugar, os largos trazem a tona uma realidade clandestina e subterrânea da vida social dos espaços públicos.

PROJETO URBANO SUSTENTÁVEL PARA A CIDADE DE ITU

Este artigo é fruto de uma pesquisa de doutorado da FAUUSP, desenvolvida na cidade de Itu – interior oeste de São Paulo, a qual teve uma expansão desordenada e uma dispersão urbana vinculada à especulação imobiliária e ao uso inadequado dos recursos naturais. Novos cenários foram propostos para o desenvolvimento de um projeto urbano sustentável para Itu, criando uma conexão entre o Centro Velho e o Novo Centro, a partir de três eixos estruturadores: ecológico, cultural e hídrico, por meio de uma mobilidade sustentável e um ordenamento territorial do Centro Histórico. A intenção é promover uma melhor qualidade de vida urbana, uma valorização e apropriação das áreas verdes e dos conjuntos arquitetônicos de importância histórica, para uso público, e a preservação e o uso racional dos recursos naturais disponíveis no meio urbano.

State-led gentrification in previously ‘un-gentrifiable’ areas: Examples from Vancouver/Canada and Frankfurt/Germany

Through an analysis of two international cases from Canada and Germany, this paper highlights the role of the state in governing gentrification and displacement in areas previously thought to be unattractive for profit-seeking capital, that is, ‘un-gentrifiable’. With this, we seek to contribute to the debate on how the role of the local state has changed from securing affordable housing for low-income households into becoming an essential player involved in real estate speculation. Taking Little Mountain in Vancouver as the first example, we examine the privatization and demolition of the public housing complex and thus the withdrawal of the state. Our second example, Ostend in Frankfurt, investigates the restructuring of a working-class neighbourhood through active state-led interventions including massive public investment. We analyse the two empirical examples along five dimensions: causal drivers and mechanisms that have led to the changing role of the state in governing urban transformations; policy instruments used by state agencies to encourage gentrification; strategies to legitimize state-led gentrification; outcomes in terms of direct and exclusionary displacement; and the forms of contestation and protest. We maintain that both cases, although presenting a stark contrast, follow the same rule, namely state-led gentrification.

Women's sex/porn sanctuaries and social movements in Hong Kong and San Francisco

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the views and activities of sex activists and entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and San Francisco who were interviewed about the topic of queer and feminist pornography and its relationship to social movements. Hong Kong in recent years has become an exemplary East Asian protest site where questions of feminism, LGBTQ rights and erotic entertainment are negotiated at the borders of a larger democracy movement. For decades, San Francisco has been a mecca for LGBTQ activism, while also being at the forefront of queer pornography industries. This cross-cultural study and its ethnographic encounters will highlight and compare manners of queering porn and politics, while offering an interpretation of Judith Butler's writings on performativity and assembly as a way to understand contemporary activism and body politics. Finally, in a push to decolonize the myth of San Francisco as the more ideal erotic city, the article reflects on geo-political shifts affecting counter-cultural legacies of sexual collectivity and entertainment, including ongoing real-estate speculation coinciding with a global upsurge of supremacist governments.