Speculative Urbanism: A Genealogy of Land Speculation in Spain

The Spanish bubble (1997-2008) sustained a decade-long process of home-price inflation that coexisted with a wave of residential overproduction. To explain this, the Spanish experience is best understood as the overlap of two bubbles: 1) a housing bubble, partly driven by global processes of mortgage securitisation, and more importantly, 2) a land bubble that incentivised residential construction and drove up the prices of the homes built on top. It is often argued that this land bubble was the result of processes of deregulation (land market liberalisation; erosion of urban planning), an explanation that tends to represent speculative bubbles as the spontaneous combustion of markets in an institutional vacuum. By contrast, this paper argues that Spanish patterns of land speculation were the result of a process of slow institutional maturation, the culmination of a long history of attempts to solve a perennial problem of housing provision.