The Wall Street Journal    Katherine Clarke   Actor Brad Pitt has paid $40 million for a roughly century-old home on a bluff in the Carmel Highlands along California’s central coast, according to public records and people familiar with the deal. Known as the D.L. James House, the property dates

South China Morning Post   Xinlu Liang   China Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted developer, was ordered to demolish 39 buildings on Ocean Flower Island, a project comprising three man-made islands developed by the company in China’s southern Hainan province, within 10 days. The or

Sergio del Molino   The coronavirus is said to be emptying cities. Myriad news items and articles took this exodus for granted. There is no province that has no record of a town to which two or three families have relocated, fleeing the city, and some places have seen a

LSE   Ricky Burdett   Jean-Louis Missika   The media has been quick to predict the premature demise of New York, London or Paris. Yet it is difficult to learn lessons about the impact of the pandemic on major cities, because it is not over. Surveys and statistics are very popular, but often m

The Economist   Can it be done without harming the wider economy? October 6th 1979 was a beautiful Saturday in Washington. It was not the kind of day that augured wrenching change in economic policy. But on that date Paul Volcker, then chairman of America’s central

The Economist   Economies can suffer both sudden crashes and chronic diseases. Housing markets in the rich world have caused both types of problem. A trillion dollars of dud mortgages blew up the financial system in 2007-08. But just as pernicious is the creeping dy

Paulo Martins Barata   ‘Back on the Chain Gang,’ the song by Chrissie Hynde written after the collective overdose of the British band The Pretenders, would be the perfect metaphor for the endemic schizophrenia of Dubai’s property market. Every year the emirate hosts ‘Citys

El País   Luis Fernández-Galiano   The real estate crisis that led to the financial collapse of the emirate of Dubai marks the end of an urban model; another of the Gulf emirates, Abu Dhabi, proposes an alternative model with Masdar, a new city with no emissions and no waste.

José María Fidalgo   La situación de la economía española es grave. No sólo estamos viviendo un cambio de ciclo tras catorce años de crecimiento sostenido, sino que la profundidad de la crisis, a la que se superpone la alarmante situación financiera internacional, está m

El desajuste de los mercados inmobiliarios ha reducido sustancialmente el crecimiento económico de los Estados que, como Dubai, eran emblema del boom especulativo. Lejos quedan ya los fastos pirotécnicos que iluminaban el perfil de la palmera constru

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Mortgages produced a violent bubble. Its burst has left a desolate landscape, and we do not yet understand how the real estate collapse has produced such devastating effects. The term ‘bubble’ evokes the lightness of soap bubbles or helium balloons,

Luis Fernández-Galiano   While towers soar, stock markets crash. The completion of the Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, coincides with the bursting of the Gulf’s real-estate bubble, and in Spain the four new Madrid towers reach their final height as markets col

Brigitte Schultz   Mecca is the holiest spot on earth. At least, it is considered by five percent of the earth’s population who are of Islamic faith and face towards the city in prayer five times a day. They believe that Mecca was founded in the 19th century B.C. by th

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Madrid speeds up because Spain does so. The city’s unchecked growth reflects the unique dynamism of the country’s economy, which has in the capital the headquarters of the main corporations and its most powerful business engine. The rhythm of change

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Marbella has undergone an exorcism. With Mthe dissolution of the City Council and the imprisonment of those responsible, political and judicial Spain tries to drive away the all too familiar demons of speculation and corruption, expel the evil spirit

Ricardo Aroca   En el último año se han puesto en el mercado 600.000 nuevas viviendas en España, más que en Francia y Alemania juntas y del orden del 40% de todas las construidas en la Unión Europea. A pesar de ello el precio ha seguido aumentando a una tasa cercana

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The problem of housing has become the problem of the city. During the 20th century, the urban mutation spawned by the mechanization of agriculture and the migration from the country to the city gave rise to the so-called ‘housing problem’. The areas

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We live explosive times. On the one hand, the residential boom has acquired a new economic and urban protagonism: the real estate bubble is the driving force of growth, and the formless extension of construction the main feature of contemporary plann