Standing in front of Trump Tower’s gold and bronze facade in Lower Parel Mumbai (formerly Bombay), real estate may seem an inevitably global phenomenon. This sleek, American-style building—part of a gated complex with pools, gyms, gardens, and other upscale amenities—has come up in a district whose now-defunct textile mills employed some 600,000 workers in the 1960s and defined Bombay as a working-class city (Finkelstein 2019). This transformation from working-class to elite urban landscape feels familiar from the many other cities where real estate has replaced industry as an economic activity—New York or London, Barcelona or Cape Town—and from the stories that scholars tell about finance now outpacing manufacturing as the dominant mode of the global economy.
But it is not inevitable that land would be used in this way. Nor is the name “Trump” on the tower a simplistic sign of global flows of capital. Looking a little more closely, the tower is actually quite puzzling, for India’s land markets lack a condition that is seen as sine qua non for real estate in the West: conclusive titles. And yet real-estate projects have been built at a frenzied pace in India’s post-liberalization period (since the 1990s) (Balakrishnan 2019; Searle 2016). How? Trump himself, or even the Trump corporation, did not buy the land, get the permissions, build the building, or market this tower. Instead, in each Indian city where there are Trump Tower projects underway—Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon, and Kolkata—different business partners with their own political connections and sources of capital have licensed the name “Trump” from the Trump Organization (Schmidt 2017). These intermediaries take on the risks of developing land without conclusive title; they draw on their own social, political, and caste capital to negotiate the hurdles of transforming land into real estate (cf. Searle 2018). Their work as intermediaries points to both the intense locality of real-estate deals and the particular histories of capital accumulation, political networks, and state formations in India that local actors use to make real estate.
It is our contention that tracing such local networks and machinations is essential to a nuanced understanding of real estate. Scholars have coined—and debated—terms like “the real-estate turn,” “rentier capitalism,” and “financialization” to describe the shift from manufacturing to property as predominant modes of capital accumulation and to understand the changes in city spaces and power dynamics that have accompanied that shift (Aalbers 2017; Christophers 2015, 2020; Shatkin 2017). In this collection of essays, however, we unpack such broad concepts through particular case studies that provide a nuanced understanding of context, history, and culture. In doing so, we take up Timothy Mitchell’s call to “think against” universal concepts: “the task is to pose large questions not by starting with a concept and looking for its absence or expression in any one place, but by interrogating the concept from the ground up, with a fine-grained archival attention to how collective forms of life actually work” (Abourahme and Jabary-Salamanca 2016, p. 738). The papers in this collection “think against” the concept of real estate, starting with—and generating—detailed questions about particular places.
The individual contributions for this special issue emerge from a brainstorming session we called a “think-in,” a morning spent comparing our diverse field sites—in India, Indonesia, the United States, and South Africa—and discussing capital accumulation, the state, and history. The conversation (a transcript of which was shared with contributors) was open-ended and wide-ranging.
During the think-in, as contributors started discussing urban-studies concepts through the vantage point of the specific places they study, it quickly became apparent that terms like gentrification, public–private partnerships, and financialization were imprecise. Take the case of “the rent gap,” a prominent theory conceptualized by the Marxist geographer Neil Smith from his empirical work on gentrification in New York and Philadelphia in the 1980s. Smith’s theory of gentrification centered on capital devaluation in American cities, which, he argued, produced a “rent gap”: “the disparity between the potential ground-rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use” (Smith 1996, p. 65). A wide rent gap attracted developers who could profitably buy, renovate, and resell properties—resulting in gentrification. This term has entered our scholarly vocabulary as urbanists, but as we were discussing real-estate investments in our own field sites during the think-in, the concept became fuzzy, diffuse, and less mechanistically economic: contributors referenced anything that might help make land (appear) valuable—from regulations to aesthetics, racialized fear to new class formations—taking us far from Neil Smith’s original definition. [1]
Thinking about the expansiveness of our conversation and re‑reading the transcript of the think-in, it became clear to us that the contributors were starting not with grand concepts or theories—which, like “rent gap,” were sitting uneasily with our own empirical data—but with a series of materially grounded questions that take history and place seriously: what is the context in which land appears as a real-estate possibility, and for whom? What are the planning rules and instruments for realizing real-estate value, and with what consequences? What local, racialized—and perhaps imagined—histories shape the types of real-estate projects that seem possible in a specific place and time? These grounded questions made clear that what could be taken for granted in a certain context emerges as a puzzle that needs to be explained in another [2].
During the think-in, a scholar who works in Mumbai started with the puzzle of how manufacturing elites during the Cold War needed the state to step in to socialize land access and keep land rents as low as possible to maximize industrial profits. Later, in the context of liberalization, these older regulations that kept land rents low were repealed. How, why, and through what processes did manufacturing elites deploy their privilege to align with the turn to real-estate accumulation?
A scholar who works in New York then chipped in and added that, for New York, the 1930s New Deal era was a pivotal moment for the creation of rules, laws, practices, calculations, institutions that code land as real estate. These planning institutions then gained durability and cemented the way in which the real-estate market is shaped and governed. Interestingly, the New York scholar also reminded us that Donald Trump’s father had first-mover advantage in entering the new housing programs created by the New Deal-era Federal Housing Agency.
Bringing disparate cases like New York and Mumbai together forces us to recognize the place of place within urban and planning theory. These disparate cases reveal that concepts and categories that we take for granted—like rent gap, financialization or even real estate—are in fact abstracted from the grounded experiences of specific places at specific times. Juxtaposing these cases allows us to ask questions that might not arise unless we bring “incommensurate” cases together. We highlight three such clusters of questions that arise from our think-in:
1. Who is the developer?
Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of the developer and the importance of brokerage to transformations in the built environment (Balakrishnan and Pani 2021; Ballard and Butcher 2020; Bjorkman 2021; Gidwani and Upadhya 2022; Searle 2018). But who becomes a developer? In contrast to the real-estate markets in the US that are driven by professional and corporate developers and propertied capital (Fogelson 2014; Stevens, 2016; Weber 2019), our varied cases reveal a rich cast of characters who take on the role of developer or otherwise play a major part enabling real-estate projects: elites in a racialized society, progressive politicians, small agrarian landholders, family-owned industrial conglomerates, and others. These grounded histories bring to the fore institutional actors who are complicit in the production of unequal cities, but in ways that are not easily predictable. In other words, the act of land valuation, the gamble that something that is of little value today can be made valuable in the future, is mediated by actors who may not look like the familiar figure of the Western developer, but who are nonetheless at the forefront of a new wave of enclosures (cf. Christophers 2018).
2. What social relations shape real-estate markets?
Moreover, if real-estate developers are doing relational work, as scholars have argued – then what are the social relations that they manipulate? Building on the pioneering work of Yanagisako (2002) and Harriss-White (2005), which invites us to see markets as fields of power relations organized through (not just embedded in) social connections (see also Gandhi et al. 2020), we can ask in what ways do family ties, racial boundaries, caste networks, and/or class affinities shape the making of markets in land and buildings? As with Indonesia’s oligarchic politics based in family-owned business conglomerates, social connections extend through and beyond the state, which often operates as a mediator to deeply historical/social claims. This insight provides a lens for understanding real estate beyond the private–public binary (cf. Osburg 2013). Exposing social networks in the making of real-estate markets opens inquiry into the “fraternal” forms of capital (cf. Chari 2004; Jenkins 2021) that underpin even the most global real-estate markets. [3]
3. What histories underpin real-estate development?
The contributors theorizing from Johannesburg, Chennai, Mumbai, and Jakarta focused on the Cold War as a period that needs to be carefully analyzed if we are to grasp the complexities of the contemporary real-estate turn. There is a rich scholarship on urban land under late colonialism in non-Western contexts, but the workings of urban land during the Cold War remains, oddly enough, under-researched. A focus on the planning and institutional legacies or hangover of the Cold War on contemporary real-estate deals prompts new lines of inquiry. One line of inquiry we discussed at the think-in is to ask how structural adjustment programs pushed by US-based international financial institutions such as the Bretton Woods Institutions facilitated the ongoing real-estate turn.
Another line of inquiry is to focus on the agricultural modernization programs such as the Green Revolution (1960s–80s). A key Green Revolution strategy was to strictly regulate agricultural land to keep land rents as low as possible in order to maximize food production. From the 1990s onwards, many societies enacted a wave of land-liberalization reforms that repealed these tight regulations on agricultural land. As agricultural land now becomes the new frontier for real-estate development, we need to fold in older histories of agrarian land and land ownership into the making of contemporary real-estate markets. [4] In other words, real-estate markets cannot be understood only by focusing on cities, but also new sites such as the urbanizing countryside, which in turn demands a breaking-down of inherited silos such as urban studies and agrarian studies.
This special issue unpacks these themes with five articles from varied institutional contexts. Raidoo’s essay focuses on gated communities being built on farmland in between the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg in South Africa. Raidoo shows how real-estate value for the gated communities is created through aesthetics that recall Transvaal settler-colonial architectural styles. Raidoo questions why such a “rural” aesthetic should become valuable at a time of deepening democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. Gajendran’s essay focuses on real-estate developments in peri-urban Chennai in India. Gajendran demonstrates how agrarian distress produces Chennai’s peri-urban growth. Smallholder farmers in this region are not being evicted from their agricultural land. Instead, they appear to be willing participants in the making of real-estate markets. However, Gajendran reveals how the patchwork making of the real-estate market cuts off marginal farmers’ access to roads, water, and other connective public works. These are instances that force us to nuance dispossession, which should be understood not only as visible forms of eminent domain, but also the more insidious forms of market risk and economic coercion. Both Raidoo’s and Gajendran’s essays foreground the agrarian histories of real-estate markets. Rao’s and Shatkin’s essays take seriously the Cold War context. Rao’s essay focuses on Bombay/Mumbai, and he unpacks a puzzle. In Mumbai, the progressive planning legislation of the 1960s and 1970s that sought to curb land speculation ironically enabled the rise of real estate in the early 1980s, now most visibly expressed in the urban transformation of textile mill lands into complexes of real-estate spectacle. Shatkin’s essay focuses on the period of the Vietnam War. He shows how the authoritarian state in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, backed by the US, claimed rights over land, centralized urban planning, and mobilized resources. It is these legacies of oligarchic politics that have now spawned large family-owned conglomerates, with privileged access to ruling elites, that have monopoly control over urban land and real-estate profits. Shatan investigates how development intermediaries in the United States produced Black-led cooperative housing in the 1950s funded by Federal Housing Authority mortgage insurance. These efforts blurred private-public distinctions as advocates navigated a fraught ideological terrain to build successful housing projects.
In sum, all our contributors display an uneasiness with an unreflexive resort to “neoliberalization” as the answer to ongoing processes of land commodification and monetization, rentier capitalism, and urban inequalities. Such uneasiness prompts us to search for outlier cases and the nuances of the historical record that have brought us to our present conjunctures. It is these nuanced, provincialized, historically comparative understanding of the “real-estate turn” that can equip us with the sensibilities and praxis to grasp with more accuracy the power dynamics at play in real-estate accumulation – and thus better equip us to intervene or oppose them.
Articles in this series:
- “Urban Theory and the Cold War: Reflections on the Political Economy of Urban Land and Real-Estate Development in Southeast Asia”, by Gavin Shatkin
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