From boom to bubble: how finance built the new Chicago
本书研究芝加哥2000年代初的房地产繁荣，揭示在经济增长乏力背景下，政府、开发商、金融家等如何共同推动过度建设，最终形成投机泡沫，并分析其对城市环境、公共投资和宏观经济稳定的影响。
A building boom is often seen as a feature of economic growth and innovation in cities. Rachel Weber, Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at University of Illinois Chicago, argues that it could also be a symptom of employment stagnation and population decline. When recapitalization and securitization promote a debt-fueled real estate market, the original demand-driven construction will be transformed into speculative bubbles. Weber documents Chicago’s ‘Millennial Boom’ during the early 2000s to show how overbuilding in Chicago’s central business district was coproduced by the city government, developers, brokers, financiers and local tenants, in the context of a sluggish economy. The book offers a compelling analysis of the causes and consequence of boom-and-bust cycles in the real estate market. It also provides a critical economic, political and geographic inquiry into how overbuilding activities affect cities’ environment, public investments and macroeconomic stability. The book builds on Weber’s long-term interrogation of urban planning, real estate and public finances in Chicago. It is structured into three parts. In Part I, Weber outlines the theoretical debates regarding the relationship between markets, urban economies and the built environment. To begin, she problematizes the neoclassical economic approach, which relies heavily on statistical data about land values, vacancy rates and square footage of new construction to explore similarities in the length and frequency of boom-to-bust cycles. Weber argues that this approach fails to capture nuances in the social, economic and political behaviors involved in each process. Alternatively, Weber echoes David Harvey’s perception of speculation as an inevitable result of crises of capital accumulation in a credit-driven economic system. Drawing on Harvey’s Limits to Capital (2007), Weber emphasizes that the underlying need for accumulation compels investors to accelerate the mobility of funds, and when prices become detached from the sources of value, booms become bubbles. However, Weber also argues that Marxist approaches to financialization only emphasize the long-term consequences of crises while neglecting their short-term impacts on specific locations at particular moments. Moreover, Marxist theory downplays the power of individuals, especially knowledge agents, in promoting a ‘consistency of worldview’ and ‘routine professional practices’ to propel the building cycles (33). Weber, therefore, adopts an agent-centered approach that incorporates qualitative studies of the collective behavior of professionals to investigate how overbuilding activities are embedded within a combination of interests. Her unique focus on the historicity and locality of professional practices are critical to understanding the constraints of neoclassical and Marxist approaches. This section lays a solid theoretical foundation for the following two parts of the book.