Contesting “VIP urbanism”

Introduction

We live in an age of extreme and worsening urban inequality. As both global urbanization rates (UN Habitat, 2010) and global economic inequality (Dorling, 2019) approach historically-unprecedented levels, cities face both a crisis of housing affordability (Aalbers, 2015; Fields and Hodkinson, 2018), and a crisis of confidence in the ability and legitimacy of local governments to do something about it (Ranganathan et al., 2023). Many have argued for pro-market, supply-side, or YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard) approaches to the crisis of too many urbanites and not enough real estate to support them (Wetzstein, 2022). Just build more, the argument goes, and a myriad of market failures will resolve themselves. That is of course part of the solution. But as many critical urban researchers have discovered, the problem is not only what cities are not building. Just as important is what cities actually are building.

In most of the world's large cities, plenty of new housing (and other infrastructure) is being built. It's just not affordable. More likely, we see “necrotecture” (Atkinson, 2019) or “ghost dwellings” (Wegmann, 2020) of empty investment properties built to be owned but not lived in, “starchitecture” that creates aesthetically iconic but functionally limited urban infrastructure (Ponzini, 2020; Sklair, 2017), or “white elephant” projects that are so expensive to build and maintain that they divert resources from more useful ends (Gaffney, 2016; Rebentisch et al., 2020). In short, cities are increasingly built for the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected, at the expense of everyone else.

One explanation for this is what we term “VIP” urbanism, the idea that cities govern land through two sets of rules. The first set of rules applies to most of us, through de jure laws and standardized bureaucratic policies such as zoning codes, building codes, tax rules, environmental and historic preservation regulations, enforcement mechanisms, or inspection practices, to name only a few. However, in many places a second set of rules operates quietly alongside de jure land use law, as a de facto system of loopholes, easements, exemptions, lobbying, and veto power that enable some actors to shape cities in ways that violate the spirit—and sometimes even the letter—of the law. This latter approach is often facilitated by “elite capture” (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023) of urban institutions, as elites are able to coopt the local state to facilitate their own class interests. They do this not by breaking laws per se, but by bending them in remarkably profitable ways.

One example of this model of development is “billionaires row” along the south end of Central Park in New York City. This corridor of super-tall skyscrapers is home to some of the most expensive condominiums in the world, some of which are profiled in Andi Schmied's (2024) visual intervention for the special issue. This corridor also exhibits many of the development characteristics described above: extremely expensive but often-empty investment properties (e.g., units in 220 Central Park South consistently sell for hundreds of millions of dollars), ostentatiously designed starchitecture (e.g., Rafael Viñoly's 432 Park Avenue, Christian de Portzamparc's One57, or Robert Stern's 520 Park Avenue), and the occasional white elephant due to the extreme engineering used in super-tall construction (e.g., just a few years after opening, the owners of 432 Park sued the developers over noise, flooding, and elevator problems—problems all the more noticeable due to the natural sway of a 425 m tall building in the wind). The development history of this corridor also demonstrates aspects of VIP urbanism. This kind of super-tall structure is often built far taller than what is technically allowed under the law, as developers leverage loopholes in the building code (MASNYC, 2017), building both upwards (Lauermann, 2022; Troy et al., 2020) and downwards (Burrows et al., 2022) to make space for ostentatious amenities like rooftop swimming pools or underground cinemas. In billionaires row, building many of the super-talls required creative interpretation of loopholes in the building and zoning codes as developers cobbled together additional vertical construction by buying unused “air rights” from nearby lots, stacking buildings with non-residential “mechanical floors” (e.g., floors used only for elevator or HVAC machines) and wind shear spaces (empty floors with no walls, to allow wind to blow through the building), and taking advantage of zoning incentives that allow taller buildings in exchange for providing amenities like public plazas (Lauermann, 2022; MASNYC, 2017).

The general idea behind VIP urbanism will likely be familiar to most urban researchers. Special treatment for those deemed politically or economically important is remarkably common in twenty-first century urban governance, across a vast geography of cities in a wide diversity of political economic systems. However, it is also difficult to research, given the methodological challenges to accessing information about urban elites (van Heur and Bassens, 2019). Despite methodological barriers, there is a pressing need for critical urban researchers to analyze how and why elites are reshaping cities because, in many cases, the benefits that accrue to elites lead to corresponding opportunity costs and negative externalities that must be borne by others. In the context of US urban policy, for example, one has to interpret the racialized geographies of poverty through a spatial dialectic with the racialized geographies of affluence (Cashin, 2021; Goetz et al., 2020; Rothstein, 2017). Historically, the racialized costs of “redlining” subsidized the racialized benefits of “greenlining”. Even today, concentrations of central city poverty are directly related to exclusionary zoning that maintains class privilege in the suburbs. And, of course, political movements like NIMBYism create spatial winners and losers based on which neighborhood has the more powerful heckler's veto.

For this reason, the special issue explores the systemic role of elite capture in shaping the urban landscape, including (but not limited to) practices such as rent seeking, opportunity hoarding, NIMBYism, lobbying, exploiting loopholes, cronyism, and patronage politics. We asked the authors to consider research questions including: Are these isolated stories of elites run amok, or do they play a more fundamental role in capitalist urbanization? How is urban planning imbricated in class formation and reproduction? And in an age of extreme economic inequality, how might elite land use practices be contested? In the following discussion, we briefly review critical urban studies literature on these themes, and then introduce the special issue contributions which include research articles on Bengaluru (Smitha, 2024), Milan (Briata and Di Vita, 2023), Paris (Frétigny et al., 2024), Valparaiso (Caimanque and López-Morales, 2023) and Venice (Tedesco et al., 2024), as well as a visual intervention essay (Schmied, 2024) and three contentions commentaries on how VIP urbanism might be rethought and contested (Ho, 2024; Farahani, 2024; Kirk and Behm Josa, 2024).

VIP urbanism and its contestations

There is a well-established literature on the urban geography of elites, for example on the residential geographies of the super-rich (Forrest et al., 2017; Hay, 2013), the financialization of housing through luxury development (Fernandez et al., 2016; McKenzie and Atkinson, 2020), patronage politics ranging from party machines to local aristocracies (Bassens et al., 2019), or the complicity of urban planning in the production of white privilege (Goetz et al., 2020). Elitist land use and extreme socio-spatial inequality are by no means new—as evidenced, for example, in the longstanding influence of historical figures like W.E.B. Du Bois or Friedrich Engels in critical urban geography (Hackworth, 2021; Royle, 2021). But these forms of inequality have intensified in recent decades due to a “transnational capitalist class” (Brash, 2011; Pow, 2017) who drift from one trendy neighborhood to another, leaving in their wake a form of “alpha territory” (Atkinson, 2020)—affluent globalized neighborhoods within affluent global cities, with strikingly similar architecture (Ponzini, 2020) and familiar forms of gentrification (Sigler and Wachsmuth, 2020). In this sense, VIP urbanism often overlaps with the extreme forms of gentrification driven by the transnational circuits of real estate capital that Neil Smith (2002) once described as the “global urban strategy” of neoliberal states or Tom Slater (2017) explained through the broadening scale of “planetary rent gaps”.

The mere existence of elites in a city does not, by itself, prove that VIPs are receiving preferential treatment. For that, recent research has pointed to the concept of “elite capture” as a mechanism that turns generic forms of privilege into specific instances of preferential treatment such as cronyism, nepotism, patronage, monopolies, exemptions, easements, or the many variants of NIMBYism. The concept has long been used in disciplines like economics and political science to describe the phenomenon of elites commandeering institutions to further their own class interests—often, ironically, institutions explicitly established to empower the disenfranchised, for example related to international development aid (Andersen et al., 2022) or anti-racist social movements (Táíwò, 2022). That literature is intentionally open-minded on the question of who qualifies as “elite” because the capture process is often a contextually specific and determined in relation to local institutions and social networks. It could take the form of class conflict on economic grounds, but it could also involve elites who exercise power through other means, such as bureaucrats who control government resources but earn relatively modest salaries or cultural elites who run influential institutions with limited budgets. Reading the concept against research on gentrification, Lauermann and Mallak (2023) show how elites capture the mundane institutions of urban land use governance through four spatial strategies including rent seeking through land monopolies, spatial opportunity hoarding through NIMBYism, exploiting regulatory loopholes to maximize capital fixing in real estate, and coopting “participatory” mechanisms within urban planning to push elitist agendas. Ranganathan and colleagues (2023) demonstrate that while much of this is technically legal, elite captures so profoundly undermine public trust in local government that they form the basis for “corruption stories”—self-fulfilling prophecies about the ineffectiveness of urban governance in late capitalism.

This framework allows for a systemic reading of VIP urbanism. While it operates in contradiction to “normal” urban governance, it is by no means an accident or aberration. To quote Olúfẹ´mi Táíwò's (2022: 10) political theory of elite capture, this “is not a conspiracy…it is a kind of system behavior.” As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, deference to VIPs is a routine, normalized, and widespread governance practice in many cities. For this same reason, it is also increasingly contested by a wide range of urban stakeholders.

Urban scholars have shown how VIP urbanism is fostered by a web of multi-scalar policies and political practices, though with recourse often sought at the local level. In their study of land reform in Kenya, Bassett (2020) examines the continuation of highly centralized, colonial-era planning laws that were designed as physical and technical devices rather than in service of community and civic engagement. Anti-corruption land reform has become a broadly held demand across activist, professional, and government groups in Kenya. However, Basset frames this contestation against land grabs and zoning approvals as specific demands for decentralized participatory oversight and transparency in urban planning. The goal behind local oversight is to “bring daylight to problems of non-compliance,” though it is also importantly not presented as a catchall remedy, as such reforms have the potential to “shift the locus of corruption to the county” (2020: 16).

In response to local corruption in financing land transfers, Whiting (2011) shows how residents of an agricultural village in peri-urban China look to the court system for procedural justice. The villagers’ collective, publicized distrust successfully undermines local leaders’ authority, which serves to circumvent typical mediation procedures and instead forces land dispute cases into the courts. Von Hoffman (2009) presses the concern for intensifying contradictions at the local level more specifically in an examination of US housing reform and policy. He argues that federal and state progressive planning reforms wholly depend on local support to succeed but can ultimately be restricted by local governance aiming to subvert them. Oppositional tactics against VIP urbanism in these cases rely significantly on place-based civic organizing with the purpose of strengthening existing social reforms and progressive systems, as opposed to passing new legislation or broader base building.

Others approach contestation more explicitly in terms of coalition building against the combined effects of elite urbanism. Ivester (2017) shows how mega-projects pose a duality between their profit-seeking versus the heightened visibility of social inequalities they cast, instilling an urgency for citywide activist mobilization. Protesters of Olympic bids, for example, increasingly point to the social and economic crises the Games inflict on communities, including immediate destruction of existing infrastructure and housing or channeling what would be future public resources into private development. In response to Rio de Janeiro's 2016 bid, community members aligned with academics to create an urban development plan that responded to residents’ identified problems—prompting democratic political engagement even without recognition by the mayor (Ivester 2017). Maharawal (2023) frames contestation to two-tiered urbanism as infrastructural activism that interrupts a particular daily process, such as Google's private bus network, for broader political ends. The bus blockade demonstrations connected San Francisco's public-private divide in bus transit to the city's deepening housing segregation and gentrification-induced displacement. The organizers emphasized the necessity of facilitating connections across geographies and struggles–pointing to issues of privatization and transit to collectively call for an eviction moratorium.

The special issue

The research in this special issue contributes to the conversation by exploring the systemic nature of VIP urbanism in twenty-first century urban governance, and evaluating forms of and opportunities for its contestation. The authors contribute rich empirical analysis across a diverse range of cities—including research studies on Bengaluru (Smitha), Milan (Briata and Di Vita), Paris (Frétigny and colleagues), Valparaiso (Caimanque and López-Morales), and Venice (Tedesco and colleagues). These articles also offer a variety of theoretical frameworks for future research on VIP urbanism and its contestation, and are supplemented with shorter essays on luxury housing in New York City (Schmied) and Hong Kong (Ho), and theoretical commentaries on insurgent planning (Kirk and Behm Josa) and (de-)globalization (Farahani).

The collection starts with Frétigny and colleagues’ (2024) contribution. They assess airport urban development as a form of VIP urbanism. Taking the Paris (France) city region, and specifically Aeroports De Paris (ADP) as a case study, they show how the impact of airport-city business models extends beyond the development of airport terminals to the land use and development in its vicinity. By extending the scale of analysis spatially beyond the actual airport terminal, they achieve two analytic goals. First, they question the exceptionalism and specificity of airport urbanism by linking it to forms of elite capture at play in urban development and land use that ADP engages in. Second, this allows for a broader critical analysis of the impact that airport-led urbanism has on regional economic inequality, as well as housing and public health. To investigate these linkages, Frétigny and colleagues draw on three sources of data including interviews, press releases, and document analysis. The analysis showcases how ADP's non-aeronautical real-estate activities present a form of VIP urbanism driven by the maximization of financial gain. They argue that the corporatization of ADP in collaboration with public authorities led to the privatization of airport land via forms of elite capture of land use and development processes. The implication of the privatization of airport land goes beyond the airport development model not meeting its economic ends, but also includes its conflicts with other land use possibilities (such as housing), local stakeholders in the city region, and public health for residents in the vicinity of the airport.

Next, Briata and Di Vita (2023) investigate the connections between “alpha territorialization” and VIP urbanism in Milan (Italy). Unlike other highly-globalized alpha cities, alpha territorialization in Milan does not attract the super-rich to the same extent, but a large tourism industry impacts segregation in cities and regions throughout the country. Their extensive literature review and analysis of policy documents show how Milan's overall approach to attracting investment and economic growth is shaped by the logic of alpha territorialization, while also further developing the issue of tourism in VIP urban governance. Like the examples of more typical alpha territorialization, Milan relies on attracting private investment for large-scale urban projects and for establishing creative and cultural districts. While this type of investment was once more concentrated in the national economy, it is now increasingly backed by international real estate capital. The spatial manifestation of this economic strategy is conducive to VIP urbanism as it caters to the super-rich through luxury development schemes. In Milan, this holds significant consequences for access to affordable housing—evident in the sharp rise in both housing prices and wait lists for public housing. Overall, Briata and Di Vita's study shows how to use the alpha-territorialization framework to understand the shifting geographies of economic disparity in small cities and rural regions, even if they do not represent such extremes as those found in other global cities.

Tedesco and colleagues (2024) likewise engage with the theory of alpha territorialization by studying high end tourism development in Venice (Italy). Their case study showcases how combining alpha territorialization with a place-specific study of luxury tourism helps us understand the differentiated impact that “touristification” can have in heritage rich cities. They use a historical review of urban restructuring in Venice to track an accentuation in real estate investment, and elites’ impact on the societal and urban fabric of the city, while attending to the nuances through which such restructuring has played out in the old city of Venice as opposed to its island archipelago. This restructuring has led to a systematic depopulation and ageing of the central city as the overall residential character was replaced with tourism. Tourist investment and privatization in the city's islands culminated in the state's decision to put one of them (Poveglia) up for auction, triggering a social movement that sought to defend the public nature of the island. In this case, an informal association named Poveglia for Everybody (Poveglia per Tutti) slowly grew into a broader front of grassroot movements calling for the right to the city and to public space more generally.

Smitha's (2024) article works with the concept of VIP urbanism by analyzing its connection to urban entrepreneurialism as an economic growth model, taking Bengaluru (India) as a case study. India's national push toward urban entrepreneurialism transformed Bengaluru into a hub for information technology and a service-based economy. As a result, a network of elites composed of corporate lobbies, consultants, real estate agents and developers, non-governmental organizations, and technology-based entrepreneurs are attracted to the city. Smitha's research shows the impact of elite concentration such as the heightened spatial concentration of the urban poor and migrants in the outskirts of the city. In addition, he explains how a rhetoric of local investment and municipal economic initiative can create spaces for heightened elite capture of policy, which in turn shrinks municipal representative politics to an increasingly insular inter-elite management and alliances.

Caimanque and López-Morales’ (2023) similarly explore a mega-project development in Valparaiso (Chile). They show how Chile's “new municipalism” movement grew out of attempts to counter and reconfigure a diminished public sector but still has significant limitations for regulating developers’ exploitation of loopholes. They present a case study of new municipalism in the Global South, highlighting the convergence and specificities of new municipalism research which is generally focused on northern countries. As such, their case study, the Parque Pümpin mega-project, evaluates the importance of considering the degree of centralization of governance when assessing the success and viability of new municipalism as a form of participatory and progressive governance. In Valparaiso, the grassroots movement (Movement for the Defense of the O’Higgins Neighbourhood Parks, or DONP) that protested a mega housing project succeeded in halting the project. But its contestation of this specific project has also brought to the surface the close connection real estate elites had with the centralized government in Chile. DONP primarily contested the project legally. The movement presented evidence on the project's environmental impact and the right of nearby residents to green spaces in their city. Their case proved insufficient and was fiercely resisted by the developers. Only with electoral changes in Valparaiso's municipality did the DONP succeed in stopping the housing project. However, unlike the grassroots movement, the developers of the project maintained close connections to the centralized state beyond the municipal level. Caimanque and López-Morales indicate that elites have mobilized these connections to threaten the political capital of the municipal leadership, concluding that new municipalism as a form of progressive urban governance is far from guaranteed and remains entrenched in a web of elite-state connections.

Finally, these aforementioned research studies are supplemented with four shorter essays, including a visual intervention and three essays. In the visual intervention, Schmied (2024) offers a narrative of Manhattan's hard-to-access, private luxury real estate market. Her innovative use of performance art and photography offers both a methodological approach and important analytical insights about elite real estate. The author invents an alter ego, a Hungarian ultra-high-net-worth-individual (UHNWI) named Gabriella with an enigmatic husband in arts and antiquities, to gain access to the city's highest residential spaces. Schmied's photo essay captures an impersonal, ghostly setting of luxury furnishings and floor-to-ceiling windows while real estate agents explain the various curated selling points, a “ludicrous race to make their buildings and apartments feel unprecedented while competing in a narrow field with other similar projects.” Developers have managed to construct these residential supertalls by finding loopholes in decades of patchwork regulations. Meanwhile, the multi-million-dollar units are more akin to safety deposit boxes for ultra-wealthy investors rather than primary, second, or even third homes. Schmied shows how the resulting skyline carves up neighborhoods and contributes to the ever unobtainable, individualist mystique of deepening urban wealth divides.

Ho (2024) expands on luxury housing loopholes by introducing the concept of illegal luxury architecture, or “luxuritecture.” Despite the high-risk legal ramifications for constructing unauthorized building works (UBWs) in Hong Kong, elite offenders are often not convicted. While UBWs still hold their historical association with the urban poor, it is the super-rich and political elites who remodel flood walls and extend structures below ground to add extravagant amenities, like private theaters, fishponds, and servants’ quarters. Ho's intervention, however, is that such additions are anything but socially isolated, as their disregard for regulatory codes threatens the structural integrity of entire neighborhoods through soil degradation and landslides. Many of these constructions are the projects of local politicians on government land—revisiting the question of how communities might effectively challenge elite capture at the hyper-local level. The prominence of UBW infractions by the upper class, Ho argues, goes beyond mere loose interpretation of the law—fines for breaking the Building Ordinance are rarely imposed and inconsequential at best.

Farahani (2024), by contrast, argues for a critique of VIP urbanism that takes special heed in the interplay between urban governance and national political economy, specifically the rise of trade wars and nationalism around the world. This so-called “de-globalization,” he argues, should compel us to revisit our analytical lens for assessing urban microeconomics by “reintroducing the national level into urban geographic inquiry.” This macroeconomic approach breaks from recent trends that emphasize the global context and instead prioritizes the national one. Farahani shows how the framework is not a disregard for social and economic relations at the global scale, but rather a recognition of how shifting relations between nations affect hyper-inequality and investment in the urban core.

Finally, Kirk and Behm Josa (2024) signal to mechanisms for planning reform. They caution against the often-empty rhetoric of participatory models, including calls for “insurgent” planning. The idea behind insurgent planning is to examine “previously unrecognized marginalized planning histories,” civil disobedience, and community organization to draft new policy that counters the kinds of examples of elite capture explored by this issue's contributors. The problem with elite capture, however, is that institutional planning is not external to it. When we rely exclusively on professionalized expertise we fail to “recognize marginalized citizens as insurgent planners in their own right,” and reproduce the capitalist governance structures and neoliberal hegemony of status quo planning. Shifting the urban planning apparatus to administrative support of public knowledge and demands is not spontaneous, short-term, nor a reshuffling from within, but rather a retheorization of urban planning altogether. That retheorization must also confront the multi-scalar historical processes that drive policy change and investment.

In sum, we asked the contributors to assess the systemic nature of VIP urbanism and to explore ways in which it might be contested. They responded by identifying examples across a diverse geography of cities, and by developing theoretical frameworks to explore the nuances of the concept in light of both local class relations and global circuits of real estate capital. Collectively, this special issue identifies promising avenues for future research, including, especially, research on where and how VIP urbanism is contested and why some forms of contestation may be more successful than others.