Скачать или смотреть Seizing the Means of Prediction: How Finance Speculates on the Future City | Rachel Weber

In this talk recorded at BESI on October 31, 2024, Rachel Weber reveals how commercial real estate analysts have enabled big property owners — private equity funds, real estate investment trusts, investment banks, and legacy real estate companies — to become property speculators. The emerging consensus among neoliberal and Marxist economists is that rampant speculation is to blame for our dysfunctional real estate market, in which the "law" of supply and demand doesn't seem to apply.

Weber observes that analysts and the speculators who rely on them lack any special cognitive access to the future. But that doesn't stop them from trying to account for and anticipate it.

For Weber, the core problem isn't that the predictions are inaccurate — although forecasters get plenty wrong. Her more fundamental concern is that forecasts allow speculators to convert imagined spreads in the future into capital in the present, driving the "inexplicable" behavior of the contemporary real estate market.

Following her presentation, Weber invited Julien Migozzi, Urban Studies Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford, and Sai Balakrishnan, associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, for a panel discussion on the argument she presented. An open Q&A with audience members closed out the event.

The event was co-sponsored by Berkeley Global Metropolitan Studies and the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Rachel Weber is a professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Weber is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and published reports. She's also the co-editor of the "Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning," a compilation of 40 essays by leading urban scholars. Her book "From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago" won the Best Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association in 2017. Weber’s current research project, tentatively entitled “The Urban Oracular: Prediction and Speculation in Real Estate,” unpacks the mechanics of contemporary property speculation in an age of financialization and digitalization.

In addition to her academic responsibilities, Weber has served as an advisor to planning agencies, political candidates, and community organizations on issues related to property taxes, infrastructure finance, and neighborhood change. She was appointed to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Committee in 2008 and by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force in 2011. She has been cited and quoted extensively in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Economist, Crain’s, The Chicago Tribune, and other news outlets.