Land, values and valuation work: Moral imaginaries of land markets in England and Germany

Alexander Dobeson

Environment and Planning A, 2025, vol. 57, issue 5, 536-552

Abstract: Land markets are commonly thought to deviate from the neoclassical model of perfect competition due to natural scarcity, their asset-like character and the fictitious features of what is traded. But how can such a recalcitrant market object be valued and exchanged? Based on archival and ethnographic research in the field of valuation work in England and Germany, this article reveals how land is rendered as a legitimate market good by enacting moral imaginaries of what ‘the land market’ is and what it ought to be as an object of knowledge. While in England the imaginary of restless land markets emerged ‘bottom-up’ around valuers’ pragmatic engagement with the real estate sector, in Germany the careful post-war re-liberalization of the land market was intimately tied to the imaginary of orderly land markets enforced through the tight legal framework of the building code to counter speculation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these imaginaries for shaping contemporary land markets and the financialization of valuation.

Keywords: Land markets; valuation; imaginaries; fictitious commodities; morality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X251333258 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:57:y:2025:i:5:p:536-552

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X251333258

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().