Seminar (TURBA Lab): "Globalizing Urban Land Rent: A Comparative Approach"

Program

Abstract

There are indications that real estate, infrastructure, and megaprojects are increasingly – albeit selectively – assembled, designed, and produced at the global scale via diverse financial instruments. New forms of globalized, financialized, rent-intensive urbanisms challenge existing understanding of some of the key notions in urban political economy such as urban land rent, growth coalitions, or the urban commons.  I will present the theoretical framework of and findings from an ERC funded project entitled “The Urban Revolution and the Political.” I will then elaborate on a specific research site, namely the international property fair MIPM (le Marché International des Professionnels de l’Immobilier) in Cannes, France. This event is an important meeting ground for many influential actors in the global real estate industry including developers, consultants, investors, local authorities, and data providers. I will discuss its role in shaping patterns of speculative urban development at the global scale.

Bio

Ozan Karaman is a CNRS researcher in urban geography, based in LATTS (Research Centre on Technologies, Territories and Societies) in France. He was previously a lecturer in human geography at the University of Glasgow, and a researcher in urban sociology at the Singapore-ETH Centre. His work has been in urban political economy, urban theory, and comparative urbanism, with a particular focus on Istanbul. He was the PI of an ERC (European Research Council) funded research project on uneven globalization of real estate markets, exploitation of urban land rent, and the ways in which these are contested at different scales.