Photo courtesy of 19thcenturyart-facos.com
On Feb. 27 in the ZSR Library, Alexia Yates, Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard university, delivered a lecture titled “Real Estate, Cities and the History of Capitalism.” In her lecture, Yates explored the concept of urbanization in both the modern world and 19th century Paris. Yates began by citing modern statistics. “Half of the world’s population lives in cities and each day 165 migrants are moving into the urban world,” Yates said. She then claimed that cities are slowly able to become more extravagant and global from their slums, citing examples such as Sao Pablo, Brazil and Hong Kong.
Yates proceeded to move to 19th century Paris to relay her research. “In the 1870s a series of changes took place that allowed for business to form around housing: production, distribution and consumption of housing,” Yates said. These changes in housing were caused by the development of limited liability joint stock companies, a conceptual change in how people viewed property and the specialization of real estate agents. These social changes only occurred after two bloody revolutions and a demographic reorganization of the city which allowed for the companies to build apartments and infrastructure.
Actual accords of tax surveys and real estate ads were shown as they appeared at the time. Yates supplemented her entire lecture with a PowerPoint that contained a wide array of pictures from blueprints of Paris apartments to modern book titles.
Freshman Jaclyn Davis felt that the visual presentation complemented the information in the lecture. “I am a visual learner, and for me the most enjoyable part of the lecture was the PowerPoint. I especially liked the 1950s home service ads and the progression of the real estate ads from Paris,” Davis said.
Some students, however, were disappointed in the presentation. “I found the topic interesting, but she was difficult to follow and often spoke at too fast of a pace,” freshman Matthew Haddad said. “I also am unsure how the two halves of the presentation are related.”
Yates focused primarily on urbanization throughout the first half of the lecture and then abruptly jumped to the real estate of Paris in the 1800s. Yates states that the organization of her lecture is planned to create the hypothesis she intends to prove. “Real estate is an object that has a history, nothing about it is natural, but rather is something that we, as humans, have created,” Yates said.