Private interventions in the historic housing stock of Vienna. Can we speak of financialization of “heritage” preservation?
AAG, Detroit, USA 24.03-28.03.2025
Participation to the Session “Private matters? Private investments, public values and transformative urban change” 27.03.2025
Private investment in urban communities, neighbourhoods and projects is mostly framed within a debate on neoliberal urbanism and the outsourcing of state responsibilities to public-private partnerships, but this tends to downplay the diversity of actual forms of engagement and dynamics of urban transformation triggered by private actors, both in terms of overall purpose and concrete modalities. From philanthropic investments in developing new cultural poles to foundations supporting alternative land ownership models, from public-private partnerships to enlightened entrepreneurs revitalising shrinking villages, private actors play key roles in shaping our cities in ways that are or at least can be ethically and socially sustainable. While many privatisation processes are initiated with purely speculative purposes, on the other hand, not all forms of private investment and private engagement end up with dispossession of public resources, being informed by non-instrumental and substantive public concerns. Historically, private and often very wealthy actors have substantially contributed to shaping urban spaces and its social, cultural and welfare infrastructures, but much less is known about the situation today. Are patronage and philanthropy purely about tax relief, elite distinction and lucrative investments? Is there any room to conceptualise and even assess redistributive dynamics compensating wealth and power concentration in the hands of wealth elites? What role do public actors play through policies and hybrid partnerships in containing, regulating and socially orienting the impact of private actors?
Conference Website: 2025 AAG Annual Meeting - AAG
Private interventions in the historic housing stock of Vienna. Can we speak of financialization of “heritage” preservation?
Sandra Guinand & Viktória Éva Lélek
Taking Vienna, Austria, as a place study, this paper aims at exploring the financialization’ s dimensions of interventions in historic housing buildings, identified as the Gründerzeit historic housing. We seek to understand the financialization’s dimension that lay behind these, often private initiatives, to ultimately unravel its influence on initiatives, public private expressions and arrangements related to heritage preservation (or not). In the context of real estate markets, financialization is understood as a process of the accumulation of capital which has been driven by a growing wall of money to be profitably placed in many different kinds of ventures (Serfati 2011), as a process of increasing liquidity and mobility of capital determining the logic of financial investments in urban and housing projects (Theurillat et al., 2015), or/and as the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives (Fernandez & Aalbers, 2016; Aalbers, 2017). We, however, aim to specifically look at financialization of public policies (Buffa et al., 2021) more specifically, how socio-technical and policy instruments favour the intervention of private actors in the sector of historic housing stock and what are some of the outcomes. To do so, we critically analyse the housing market and historic housing preservation regulations as well as urban renewal/regeneration planning strategies of Vienna and look at some projects, settings and results.
