Real estate speculation is undoubtedly the greatest villain singled out by those who study, inhabit, or are simply interested in cities today. It gets blamed for practically every urban problem: whether a city is too dense or too sprawling, choked with traffic or prohibitively expensive; whether local politics are corrupt or the poor are marginalized to the periphery; whether corporations profit from public investments or public infrastructure lies idle; whether historic heritage is destroyed, new buildings alter the cityscape, or informal settlements are burned down. The list is endless.
In his satirical depiction of the practice in the book *A Plunge into Real Estate*, Italo Calvino portrays the speculator, Mr. Caisotti, as a shrewd, uneducated, and unscrupulous character eager to turn historic Italian towns into concrete jungles of commercial interest. Yet, it is rare to find anyone—including Calvino himself—who can explain exactly what real estate speculation means, despite pointing to it as the source of a given problem. Thus is born the perfect scapegoat: a poorly understood term, widely accepted as a valid argument, that effortlessly claims to explain the root of complex urban issues.
