The office is dead, long live the office: On data, commercial real estate, and corporate reportage in European financial centres

Keywords: Digital geographies, urban geography, financial geographies, real estate, urban development, real estate data
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

An emergent literature has begun unpicking the intersection between digital technologies, real estate, and urban financialization (e.g. Fields, 2019; Sadowski, 2020; Shaw, 2018), with a particular focus on housing and emplaced digital/material struggles around property and data (e.g. Akers et al., 2019; McElroy, 2022; McElroy and Vergerio, 2022; Nic Lochlainn, 2021). This paper adds to work on the intersection between the digital, real estate, and urban financialization by focusing on commercial real estate development in three small-but-global and relational cities, Dublin, Luxembourg, and Frankfurt (see Hesse and Rafferty, 2020; Wong et al., 2022). The paper unpicks how real estate services firms use particular types of urban data to narrate, imagine, and seek to shape financial investment and property development in European financial centres, with a particular focus on commercial real estate and office developments. The ‘data stories’ that these firms narrate seek to produce and disseminate specific forms of knowledge and ignorance about the pasts, presents, and futures of the three case study cities, with the aim of influencing public perception, guiding investments, and shaping policy (see Kitchin, 2022; Slater, 2021). The paper argues that an empirically-grounded comparative approach to urban financialization, commercial real estate, and data extends understanding of how property markets are digitally/materially performed, as well as signposting how and why this performance is subject to change and contestation.