Economist Magazine special report on property

Very good set of articles in the current issue of the Economist magazine on the state of the world's property market:

• Bricks and slaughter
• Own goal
• When the roof fell in
• A world apart
• Prime numbers
• The old and the new
• Building excitement
• Between a rock and a living space
• Offer to readers
• Sources and acknowledgments

The article "Prime numbers," makes the point that the commercial real estate market is recovering, but only in the best locations.

I have been delving into the academic literature this week, because interacting with a grad student at York College Toronto considering the provision of spaces for the "state" and collective action has intrigued me significantly, so I am investigating the issue myself.

It'll be a few weeks before I'm able to write about some of the issues probably (a framework for thinking about the provision of spaces for community and collective action/spaces of resistance vs. the commodification of citizenship and the elimination of the public in seemingly public spaces), as well as another piece on "neoliberalism" and the market, but in the meantime it is fascinating for example that David Harvey's article on "The Right to the City," published in The New Left Review in September/October 2008, and written just before the momentous failure and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which tanked the commercial real estate property market, including the multiunit housing sector, is so remarkably prescient about the "housing bubble" and why it happened.