The circulation of capital within the built environment, as first formalised by Harvey in 1978, is treated empirically via an analysis of residential capital formation and the transfer of value within the Adelaide Metropolitan Area, in the period 1970–88. Operational concepts of value ‘creation’, ‘transfer’, and ‘capture’ are defined before estimates of housing investment and its redistribution through the medium of the urban property market are derived. These are imputed for eight subregions of Adelaide. It is suggested that the chief beneficiaries from the ‘capture’ of value during the past two decades have been the Inner Adelaide suburbs and homeowners; hence the implication of Adelaide's ‘heart transplant’.
Harvey's ‘framework for analysis’ and more particularly his account of the timing and patterning of (dis)investment within the built environment are then evaluated in light of Adelaide's experience between 1970 and 1988. It is decided that urban investment trends and patterns cannot be properly understood without giving much greater deference to fiscal and monetary policy together with the state's urban development programme than Harvey is prepared to in his analysis.
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