Land, rent and the value-form in the redevelopment of Fountainbridge

Abstract

Since its closure in 2005, the former site of the Fountain Brewery in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh has undergone a dramatic transformation from the final redoubt of industrial Edinburgh to the vanguard of upmarket Build-to-Rent housing. At the same time, the redevelopment of Fountainbridge offers a rare example of the recuperation of industrial heritage in a city that trades on the “myth of the non-industrial city”. This thesis contributes to the ongoing revival of Land Rent Theory by revisiting Marx’s writing on rent from the perspective of Value-Form Theory. In this reading, Marx presents a theory of rent as a real abstraction which flattens qualitative differences in the use-values of land into purely quantitative variations in the single dimension of exchange value. This real abstraction exerts a fetishistic power over human agents, subjecting the land to the “mute compulsion” of economic relations. Applying qualitative methods; interviews with developers, planners, local politicians and other stakeholders, and documentary research consulting planning records, company accounts and newspaper reports, I use the redevelopment of Fountainbridge as a case-study of the interaction of capital’s abstract form determinations and the concrete built-environment. I argue that the redevelopment of Fountainbridge is form-determined. The recuperation of industrial history is a result of the fetishistic power of culture and heritage in their economic form as Collective Symbolic Capital. Meanwhile the transition from housing built for sale to Build-to-Rent housing is driven by the shifting abstractions of mortgage markets, interest rates and house prices which have created ideal conditions for the extraction of absolute rents from workers trapped in the private rented sector.