Charlie Bennett

Architecture (MA)

About

Real estate is by far the most valuable class of global asset. It more valuable than any natural resource, and in turn global real estate investment has become an extractive industry. The house is no longer a machine for living in, but a machine for extracting future capital.

This has profound implications for the right to the city, as it is reformed from a space of inhabitation to primarily a new territory of financial extractavism. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the global city is its ever-increasing uninhabitability.

Today London, the old imperial capital and birthplace of modern finance, has reinvented itself as the preeminent site of global capital speculation. Gentrification has globalised and is now part of what Saskia Sassen describes as the “new logics of expulsion” driving the global economy.

The proposal seeks to use the same logics of high finance, naming rampant speculation, to undermine its effects in the city, destabilising its tendency to reinforce historic racial, colonial, and economic injustices by producing what is the ultimate cardinal sin of new architecture; to depreciate in value. This counter speculation takes the form of a rumour.

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