Track 03 PROPERTY MARKET ACTORS

Track chairs: Katia Attuyer, Pierre Le Brun, Hualuoye Yang 

As cities struggle to adapt to climate change and its associated impacts, understanding the actors and dynamics shaping land and property markets (housing and beyond) has become increasingly critical. Across diverse contexts, planning systems are confronted with mounting difficulties in regulating land and property markets as financialization and rentierization deepen the entanglement of state action with market interests and imperatives. This has contributed to intensify property speculation which, in turn, deepen social and environmental inequities. In a context of prolonged austerity and poly-crisis, cities reliance on attracting private capital to finance urban (re-) development has heightened, further complicating regulatory efforts.

Local governments have experimented with mechanisms to capture a share of rising land and property value to support public welfare objectives. However, these interventions are embedded within wider state–market relations and multi-scalar governance structures. National priorities and local policy objectives often clash, while progressive interventions can produce unintended consequences and, at times, reinforce speculative logics. Such dynamics may constrain planners' capacity to address social fragmentation and environmental degradation effectively. Advancing transformative action, particularly to support decarbonisation, reduce land artificialisation, and expand investment in green infrastructure, requires planners to engage critically with the mechanisms through which land and property markets are governed at local and national scales, while recognising the tensions and contradictions embedded within these systems.

By situating land and property market dynamics at the heart of transformative, low-carbon, and equitable urban planning, this track invites scholars to analyse the structures and limitations of planning regulation, the state-market relations embedded within them, and their evolution in the context of financialization and capitalist urbanisation. Contributions may explore pathways to more sustainable cities or critically assess why current systems and initiatives are failing to reach sustainability goals.

Contributions may explore, among other issues, the following questions:

• How do states and planning institutions enable, regulate or resist
  the financialization of land and property markets?
• How do property-market dynamics affect efforts to achieve
  decarbonisation, reduced land consumption, urban greening and social
  equity?
• When do value-capture and public-private development mechanisms
  advance public objectives, and when do they reproduce speculative or
  rentier logics?
• Which alternative ownership, regulatory, financial or planning
  arrangements can support more equitable and environmentally
  sustainable urban development?
• What can be learned from failed interventions, institutional
  contradictions and unintended policy outcomes? How are relationships
  among public authorities, financial actors, developers, landowners
  and intermediaries changing?

Keywords: state-market relations, property/land actors, financialization, rentierization, sustainability