Co-producing and commoning property market knowledge

This post was written by Andre Legarza.

Three projects have been awarded a 2021 Seed Grant XL, with a maximum of up €10.000 per grant, by the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS). The project “Levelling the Playing-Field of Urban Planning: Co-producing and Commoning Property Market Knowledge” by Sara Özogul, Tuna Tasan-Kok and myself was among the winners.

The awarded projects foster inter- or transdisciplinary dialogue, contribute to the CUS’ strategic focus on the urban commons and contribute to original research in the field of Urban Studies.

Property market actors play important roles in shaping built urban environments. But in-depth, empirically-driven research that investigates how these actors make decisions within urban space remains missing within urban scholarship and municipal policy decisions.

The diversity of sources and knowledge accumulated in property markets are often overlooked. This gap is explained by lacking transparency within the property sector, making it difficult to collect systematic and reliable data.

Property market research and data is expensive and protected by strong privacy regulations – making it inaccessible to most urban scholars. Similarly, planning practitioners and scholars seldom attend property conferences or publish in academic finance and property-related journals.

In this proposal, we argued that the gap between urban (planning) and property scholarship can be bridged by creating dialogue between property market actors, planning experts, and scholars. We want to initiate this dialogue through coordinating the following activities to bring different ‘universes’ together, co-producing property market knowledge for urban planners, and commoning the results:

1. Research platform: the platform will host the webinars and connect planning and property experts to work on the textbook, other publications, and long-term education projects.
2. Webinar Series: the webinars will inform future academic outputs and provide a space for scholars, policymakers, and property market experts to network and co-produce solutions to urban challenges. Planning master and graduate students will be invited to assess the lucidness of shared knowledge.
3. Textbook: the textbook will share actionable project findings with urban planners, informed by the research platform, webinars, and outside research activities.

Each activity aims to link contemporary planning questions with property scholarship and practises, providing a transparent and comprehensible property market knowledge basis for urban planners. This project builds on the ongoing research project WHIG.