On 5th September 2024 Rowland and colleagues wrote a blog for SPERI entitled “City fortunes: The sources of wealth and international homeownership of the world’s urban wealth elite”. Based on newly published research, they reveal the dominant industrial sectors for particular cities, key differences in the levels of inherited/self-made wealth, and the geography of their additional homes. What are the implications of new data to reveal the roots of urban fortunes around the world?
On 23rd September 2024 Rowland and his colleague Amparo Tarazona-Vento wrote a blog entitled “City Icons, Super Architects, and the Super-Rich” for PLATFORM - a digital forum for conversations about buildings, spaces, and landscapes.
Rowland and colleagues have published an open access article “The global urban elite: the sources of wealth and residential networks of the super-rich in 10 cities” in Finance and Space, volume 1, 2024.
They report on work using new data to offer profiles of the resident wealth elite of 10 key cities across the globe. They look at the wealth elites of Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Lagos, London, Mexico City, New York, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco and Sydney – cities with among the greatest concentrations of the super-rich in each global region. Using machine learning techniques applied to commercial data on the super-rich they consider what this data tells us about each city elite’s: (i) sources of wealth by industrial sector, (ii) dynastic or ‘self-made’ bases of wealth, (iii) global distribution of the residences that they own and, finally, (iv) a typology of the character of each city’s wealth elite. They conclude with a brief discussion of the value of using machine learning to help understand wealth elites in a context of growing unease around expansions in urban wealth inequalities.
Rowland and his colleague Amparo Tarazona-Vento have written an open access journal article for City, volume 28, issue 3-4, 2024 – “Commanding heights: the role of wealthy ‘starchitects’ in city remaking”. Censuses of the world’s super-rich now include among their ranks several architects whose personal financial position stems from their status as influential ‘starchitects’. They discuss the economic, political and social forces that concentrate fortunes in the hands of professional elite who are increasingly also members of a global wealth elite. The rise of such starchitects exemplifies how capital flows are generative of subsidiary but important classes of professional agents who have accumulated significant fortunes as a result of city (re)making. Thus a select few in this field possess the kind of ‘money power’ that is generative of a capacity to direct changes in the built environment. Courted by city administrations and super-rich clients starchitects are increasingly charged with delivering symbolic projects that reinforce expansionary circulations of capital. They develop a concept sketch of how a global cadre of starchitects and their practices are fundamentally aligned with the shift of many cities to plan star-driven vehicles in order to capture capital. They discuss three elements that are crucial in determining the agency of starchitects: first, economic and political constraints or opportunities; second, normative conditions within industry and city institutional contexts; and, third, the important role of professional and power networks.
6-11 July 2025 Rowland and Mikael Holmqvist are organising a conference session on Elites in Cities, Elite Cities: Processes of (dis)Affiliation, (dis)Connection and Distinction at the RC21 Regional and Urban Development in in Rabat, Morocco on elite cities.
The session will look at the question of how new and existing wealth elites make social and physical places to accommodate themselves in urban settings. The papers in this dynamic ‘express’ panel format will examine how elites spatially and socially integrate, or maintain social and physical distance, from the wider urban fabric and other social groups. The panel will offer a series of empirical contributions regarding the extent to which elite spaces are becoming physically bounded and withdrawn, or indeed findings methods and modes of interaction with the wider city. The presentations will also examine relations within and between new and existing urban elites in these contrasting cities.