The Real Properties of Immovable Estates: Ambiguity and the Invention of the Coast

The recent housing and real estate crisis in Spain is deeply entangled with the urbanization of the coast and the demarcation of the shoreline. With high rates of both tourist developments and second homes owned per inhabitant, the Spanish case is representative for the way in which the making of the shoreline affects the making of real estate value, and how the recent crisis is a result of unethical decision-making in governmental institutions. It is urgent to read the housing crisis as a crisis of democracy in the country at large: the act of drawing the shoreline exposes the controversial politics behind every twist of that line. The boundary demarcating where building land ends and the open seas begin is not a matter of landscape management, rather it increasingly constitutes an assemblage of forces that range from insurance companies to politicians defining epistemological questions around nature and the environment for purely economic interests embedded in real estate. After the recent financial crisis, there has been a political and market shift that applies the same speculative mechanisms of real estate investments to the definition of nature. This paper connects two moments in 2006: the re-invention of the shoreline after Katrina by US insurers with the bust of the housing bubble in Spain. Far from being local, isolated and faraway cases, the paper argues that these forms of construction of the coast are the essence of a neoliberal management of landscapes and modes of inhabitation. The conflict between politicians, real estate investors, insurers and coastal dwellers about the precise definition of the coastline is a paradigmatic situation. This paper considers margins, both in spatial and financial terms, as key components of ambiguity, arguing that in the struggle to own space, the ambiguity of margins is the basis of neoliberal forms of power.