Real Estate turns architectural history toward the people who actually build cities: the developers, financiers, builders and media strategists whose pursuit of profit has shaped the modern built environment.
About this book
It is generally assumed that architects and urban planners shape cities for aesthetic and social ends. Since the onset of global capitalism, however, urban expansion worldwide has been driven largely by developers and builders working in pursuit of profit—and despite the considerable effect of market logic on urban space, the mechanisms of this industry have received comparatively little attention within architectural history.
Edited by Gregorio Astengo and Davide Spina, this volume gathers contributors who collectively foreground the actors behind real estate development as producers of architecture. It makes the case for real estate as a serious object of architectural-historical inquiry, and—just as usefully—proposes the methods and kinds of evidence needed to study it. Speculative construction from the 18th century to the present emerges as a formative force, deepening our understanding of how cities came to look and function as they do.
Key features
- Edited by Gregorio Astengo and Davide Spina
- Contributions from architectural historians including Claire Zimmerman and Chelsea Spencer
- Establishes methods and evidence types for researching real estate within architectural history
- Covers speculative construction from the 18th century to the present
What you'll discover
- Why the mechanisms of real estate development have remained a blind spot in architectural history, and what is lost by that omission
- How developers, financiers, builders and media strategists function as producers of architecture in their own right
- The research methods and forms of evidence that make speculative construction legible as a historical subject
- How market logic has shaped urban space across three centuries of city-building
About the editors
Gregorio Astengo and Davide Spina are architectural historians whose work centres on the economic and speculative forces behind the built environment. This volume is published by gta Verlag at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783856764852
- Publisher: Gta Verlag
- Publication date: 2026
Perfect for
Architectural historians and theorists, urban researchers working on housing and speculation, and practitioners who want a clearer account of the economic forces their work operates within.