[Defence of thesis] 16/12/2024 - Pierre LE BRUN: "Les logements du capital. Between cities, profits and regulation, an economic geography of private residential development in France (2008-2022)" (UMR ESPACE)

Pierre Le Brun will submit his thesis on 16 December 2024 on the subject of "Les logements du capital. Between cities, profits and regulation, an economic geography of private residential development in France (2008-2022)".

Laboratory

UMR 7300 - ESPACE - Study of Structures, Adaptation Processes and Changes in Spaces

Composition of the jury

Mr Guilhem BOULAY	Avignon University	Thesis supervisor
Mr François MADORÉ	Institute of Geography, University of Nantes	Rapporteur
Ms Natacha AVELINE-DUBACH	CNRS	Rapporteur
Mr Didier JOSSELIN	CNRS	Thesis co-director
Ms Claire CARRIOU	Paris School of Urban Planning, Université Paris Est Créteil	Examiner
Ms Clémentine COTTINEAU	TU-Delft	Examiner
Mr Renaud LE GOIX	Université Paris Cité	Examiner
Ms Julie POLLARD	University of Lausanne	Examiner

Summary

Private property developers, in their capacity as contracting authorities, build more than half of the new homes produced each year in France, and more than 80% in major urban centres. Although private property development does not have a well-established legal status, a scientific consensus has been built around a definition of developers as coordinators of housing production for profit. While many studies have looked separately at the economic behaviour of developers and the geographical distribution of their programmes, few have so far attempted to articulate these two dimensions in a synthetic economic geography analysis. Based on the case of France, this thesis shows that the geography of private residential development is the result of an interaction between the economic logic of developers and spatial structures. The need for developers to balance their balance sheets in a situation of uncertainty and the competition they face for access to land mean that they have to deploy spatial strategies tailored to their position in the development system. These strategies interact with two major components of spatial structures: the social division of urban space on the one hand, and the institutional and spatial forms of regulation on the other. This research is based on a mixed, predominantly quantitative protocol. It draws on a range of databases, both private (Adéquation's database of homes marketed by property developers) and public (database of building permits, property transactions, companies, etc.), supplemented by a qualitative component (four months' participant observation in a consultancy specialising in analysing developers' programmes, 70 semi-structured interviews with members of private development companies, social housing organisations, consultancies and local authorities).

Keywords : developer, housing, profits, regulation, spatial analysis, France