RENT THEORY AND THE
PRICE OF URBAN LAND
Spatial
organization in a capitalist economy
Csaba Deák
|
Capa/ Índice  |
This dissertation is the
account of an inquiry into the spatial
organization in the modern urban agglomeration. It starts out from the
view
that ‘location’ and ‘space’ acquire a meaning only as a support for
economic activities, and conversely, the economic laws goveming
production and
consumption become incomplete unless they account from their very
inception for
the territorial dimension of the economy. Such reciprocal determination
between the ‘spatial’ and the ‘economic’ is integrated within
the urban process through the payment for a location in the urban space
as a
necessary condition to all economic activity. This leads the inquiry to
centre upon the price of the land, the form in which the payment for
location
materializes in contemporary capitalism.
A first part of
the dissertation deals with a
critique of rent theory,
in which land price is seen as the capitalized form of land rent. An
historical
interpretation shows
that both society and the economy have been
so thoroughly transformed since the origins of rent theory in the
seventeenth
century, that none of the assumptions of the latter bears any relevance
to the
modern market economy of our day. Land price cannot therefore be
derived from
land rent, and must be analysed directly
as an independent concept in its own right.
The second part develops the
concepts of location and space as deriving
from the rise of commodity production. In particular the analysis of the
effect of competition on the transformation of the techniques of
production is
extended to include the role of location in the latter. Then the price
of
location becomes a result of the same competition which regulates
production
and it is incorporated into the cost-price of commodities. The limits
to market
regulation are reached, however, when it comes to production of
space itself that cannot be performed without state intervention.
Accordingly,
the analysis of the urban process must explore the limits and the
interaction
of market regulation and planning in spatial organization.
The last part
deals with the conditions under
which the balance between
the use of economic and extra-economic means of regulation is achieved
under
specific historical
circumstances and regimes of growth.
Planning
is seen precisely as the state activity aimed at a co-ordination of the
forces
of market competition and the interventions through land use zoning,
taxation
and public entreprise. The price of the land becomes the pivot of the
articulation of market and state regulation in spatial organization, an
articulation in turn dominated by the stage of development of the
antagonism
between corrmodity form and direct production of use values. Thus in
the
account of the price of the location economic analysis must be
complemented by
historical interpretation.
King’s College
March, 1985
Criado 05.6.10
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