Financialized Space

In 1826, Johann Heinrich von Th€ unen published Der isolierte Staat (The Isolated State), his famous early study in agricultural location theory. Von Th€ unen imagined a city situated on an endless and uniform plain surrounded by concentric rings denoting decreasing intensities of agricultural production as distances from the center increased (fig. 1). This model enabled von Th€ unen to formulate an ideal economy in which the land rent in each ring would gradually decrease toward zero as transport to the urban market became increasingly expensive relative to the value of the commodities being produced. The further away from the city, the cheaper the rent, until the “wilderness” beyond—comparatively worthless because unable to reliably furnish the market with commodities. Von Th€ unen’s model is neat and has clear implications, pointing both to the inherent qualities of the goods being produced and conveyed—the perishability of the fruit grown in the inner rings versus the durability of the timber harvested from the outer forests—as well as the potential of improved technology and infrastructure to create artificial proximities between center and periphery. Of course, this neatness also relies on a set of abstractions that are not found in reality: no city is so isolated, no commodity market is so centralized, modes of production are never so stable, natural conditions are never so uniform or predictable and no land economy is ever so free from speculation. But as William Cronon notes in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), his acclaimed environmental history of the productive system linking nineteenthcentury Chicago to the Great West, “none of these ‘distortions’ undermines von Th€ unen’s underlying principles. [... ] The ways people value the products of the soil, and decide how much it costs to get those products to market, together shape the landscape we inhabit.” And, as Cronon also notes, this soil and these landscapes were always already owned and occupied before being subjected to the practices of settler-colonial development. Later studies continued to adopt the underlying principles of von Th€ unen’s zonal model—from the Chicago School’s ring theories of urban growth, to nineteenth-century attempts to predict Parisian real estate prices—even as the increasing complexity of markets rendered commodity values more and more abstract. Today, in the age of so-called “planetary urbanization,” von Th€ unen’s rings have become vectors of consumption and production, radiating around the globe and inscribing themselves into an earth increasingly shaped and structured according to the extractive logic of capital. This issue of Architectural Theory Review was conceived and developed at a unique moment within the history of capitalism, when the first phases of the Covid-19 pandemic had given way to a global recession. Debt was cheap, placing the built environment’s imbrications with finance into sharp relief. Economic stimulus and tax concessions sparked real estate, lending and development booms as global debt surpassed the highest recorded levels in human history. Although the financial dimensions of spatial production became visible