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Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Alexia Yates
Alexia Yates*
Affiliation:
Center for History and Economics, Harvard University, 1730 Cambridge Street, CGIS-South Rm. 422, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: ayates@fas.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

“Selling Paris” explores the cultural, economic, and spatial parameters of private construction in the French capital at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to the state-centered accounts that currently characterize our understanding of Paris as a capital of modernity, this project looks to private property owners, real estate brokers, and speculative developers, as well as the moral economy in which their projects took place, in order to understand the elaboration of the built landscape of the modern metropolis. I argue that new classes of market intermediaries—namely estate agents, market-oriented architects, and small-scale joint-stock firms—emerged in this period to build and market residential spaces, establishing apartments and buildings as merchandise and tenants as clients. Focusing on the activities of these commercial actors reveals the existence of a French culture of commerce centered on speculation and risk-taking, a business culture that profoundly affected the production of residential space during of one of the city's greatest periods of expansion. Thus, in contradistinction to scholarly accounts of both French entrepreneurialism and Parisian urban development, this project reconstructs the activities of a dynamic capitalist class whose uncoordinated projects were the main authors of the capital city's urban fabric. Tracing the manner in which housing and property operated as a commercial object during a crucial period of urbanization, moving between and among the economic activities of investment, speculation, production, and consumption, this project seeks to present a research agenda for both the cultural history of markets and the economic history of cities.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 773 - 789
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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