Gambling on Real Estate: Limited Rationality in the Global Economy

Urbanization is taking on a more global character, with increasing scale of development organizations and new linkages between developers and financial institutions. These changes bring into question the way sociologists think about urbanization processes. This paper argues that the reshaping of real estate markets under the influence of global restructuring is not a one-way process, nor is it necessarily rational or functional. One should be skeptical of theoretical approaches from either an ecological or Marxist perspective that attribute autonomous causal power to “globalization” or “economic restructuring.” Deal-making, politics, mistakes, and miscalculations are as essential to the interorganizational network at the global level as at the local level. The challenge for urban theory is not to shift from local to global explanations, but rather to examine how processes at both levels intersect and collide with one another.