Towards a Property Market Paradigm of Urban Change

Abstract

Conventional treatments of urban change almost uniformly ignore the role of land and property markets as essential mediators of such change. The urban built environment is assumed to be a passive adapter to structural change. However, given the complexity of property market process—in particular the disparate nature of market actors, decision rules, and institutions, the immutable characteristics of property, and the obvious constraints imposed by the existing built environment—simple adaptive adjustment is unlikely to take place. These factors can themselves be expected to play an important part in shaping urban growth and development outcomes. In response to these concerns, we propose a property market paradigm of urban change and examine its relevance in the context of six major European urban regions. The results suggest that this approach can provide a more holistic understanding of contemporary urban change than that offered by conventional analysis.