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It is often assumed that architects and urban planners are responsible for shaping our cities. Especially since the onset of global capitalism, however,much urban expansion worldwide has been driven by developers and builders in the pursuit of profit. Despite the considerable effects of market logicon urban space, the mechanisms of this influential industry have received comparatively limited attention within architectural history.
This volume collectively foregrounds the actors behind real estate development – developers and builders as well as financiers and media strategists – as producersof architecture. It advances the study of real estate as a significant object of inquiry for architectural history and puts forward methods and types ofevidence useful for its investigation. In doing so, it seeks to further our understanding of how cities are designed and the ways speculation has shapedthe built environment from the eighteenth century to the present.

Gregorio Astengo is an architect and historian, with a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, funded by the London Arts and HumanitiesPartnership (2019). He was postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and a Postdoc Mobility Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation (2020-2025).He has taught in the UK, Switzerland and Spain on urban and architectural design and history. His research focuses on European architecture, thehistory of property development, architectural representation and technology and literature for architecture and building. Gregorio’s work has beenpublished internationally, most recently in Architectural History (2016), gta Papers (2026) and OASE (2025)

Davide Spina is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at The University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich (2021), where he alsotaught on architectural design and history. His areas of expertise are real estate development, the history of technology in architecture, architectureand media, labour in construction, and methods in architectural research. His doctoral thesis examined the post-war activities of the Vatican-controlledreal estate developer and general contractor SGI and will come out as a book with MIT Press in 2027. Davide’s work has received funding from severalinstitutions worldwide, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Swiss National Science Fund, and the Graham Foundation.