The Urban Empire of Finance: Power and Inequality in Asset Management Capitalism.
Antoine Guironnet and Ludovic Halbert Editions Amsterdam, 2023, 320 p.
In recent decades, a major upheaval has taken place quietly: a new incarnation of financialized capitalism has emerged, the asset management sector. Offices, shopping centers, student and senior residences, logistics warehouses… A growing proportion of these everyday places are now in the hands of little-known owners who see real estate as a way to grow savings from financial markets around the world.
This book, the first of its kind, takes us behind the scenes of real estate asset management in France. It shows how investment funds and real estate companies seek to impose their financial logic and criteria on the state, local elected officials, developers, and real estate promoters, and reveals how these giants have managed to build a veritable empire in major cities. Above all, it sheds light on the effects of this transformation: as asset managers capture land rents, social and spatial inequalities widen. These lessons raise questions about the place of finance in the debate on the ecological transition of cities.