Financializing the City: Global Real Estate Investment, Urban Governance, and the Narrowing of the Public (Seminar with Priya S. Gupta)

Seminar with Professor Priya S. Gupta (McGill University, Faculty of Law/Centre for Advanced Studies Reflexive Globalisation and the Law, HU Berlin)

Organized by Freie Universität Empirical Legal Studies Center (FUELS) in cooperation with the Institute for Public International Law and EU Law at FU Berlin and the Berlin Office of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law Heidelberg

This project examines the proliferation of high-rise luxury towers and real estate investment to understand the transformations of urban governance under financial capitalism. For both the city and finance, urban space is of central importance. For the city, it is the place of interactions, public life and culture, markets, corporate activities, and residential life. For finance, it is the site that makes for valuable real estate invested directly through specific projects and indirectly through financial instruments. Both luxury towers and real estate investment are crucial sites of financialization of urban space which reveal the accompanying transnational transformations of urban governance. Three broad, interrelated claims are made here. First, cities play a significant yet under-appreciated role in financial capitalism because of their power to regulate urban real estate. Second, the increasing integration of urban real estate into the global economy through financial instruments changes who is governing urban space and how it is being governed. Third, through the pursuit of urban space by the various actors acting in the interests of finance, the idea of the public itself is being re-imagined.

Priya S. Gupta <https://www.mcgill.ca/law/profs/gupta-priya> is Associate Professor of Law at McGill University's Faculty of Law, where she teaches and writes in the areas of property and international law, capitalism, and critical race theory.