4th Forum on Capital as Power: Broadening the Vista September 28-30, 2016, York University, Toronto http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/478/ 7A. Spatial Fixing of Unequal Exchange Relations in Shenzhen Adrian Blackwell, University of Waterloo School of Architecture ABSTRACT: Capital, as power, requires a physical force to direct activity. While the police and military enforce economic relations in the last instance, property in land, and its elaborations in landscape, architecture, and urbanism, act as an everyday force of coercion that fixes inequitable trade relations. In 1960, a “Coasean revolution” transformed neoclassical economics by arguing that different institutional arrangements – from individual owners to small and large firms, monopolies, and even governments – could be evaluated according to their relative transaction costs. However, Ronald Coase’s “discovery” of transaction costs came many years after Thorstein Veblen’s in The Theory of Business Enterprise. Unlike Coase’s “New” Institutional Economics, Veblen’s theory acknowledged that transaction costs were not simply barriers to free exchange, but rather functional tools used to fix property in asymmetric exchange relations advantageous to dominant capital. Coase’s and Veblen’s work can help to expand on geographer David Harvey’s concept of the “spatial fix” in order to articulate the way in which space fixes people within spaces of differential value. Chinese economists began looking to New Institutional Economics in the late 1990s in order to better explain the transitional nature of the Chinese economy. This paper will use the experimental city of Shenzhen as a model to study and critique existing theories of uneven development, arguing that the apparatus of contemporary urbanization physically delineates space in order to unevenly develop proximate spaces of differential capitalization, facilitating unequal exchange between them. 7B. The Capitalization of Green Certifications in the Building Sector Burçin Mizrak, Bauhaus University, Weimar Nitzan and Bichler’s power theory of value will be used to investigate the capitalization of green certifications in the building sector in the global context. The paper will first investigate why environmental problems and climate change have become such a high priority and share the ideas of scholars who approach the subject skeptically. Second, it will discuss the issues of third-party governance, institutionalization and monopoly practices in the green building sector, and it will attempt to offer a causal explanation for the excessive degree of monopoly in green building design. In this regard, it will explore the role of excessive institutional investment in green labels, new sustainability funds and incentives, new areas of insurance coverage, tax cuts, advertisements and publications in promoting this monopolization. Third, the paper will examine the consequences of the adoption of rating systems as the mainstream green building movement in the twenty-first century. These rating systems are part of the emergence of new sustainable material and technology industries associated with green building labels, new green job opportunities and buildings still addicted to carbon markets. This study claims that certifications in the green building sector restrict and limit designers and sabotage the quality and creativity of the buildings, but also guarantee and increase the current and future profits of institutional investors. Conference page: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/478/

Comments

1. Glad to see both studies about places other than the U.S. and women getting involved in CasP