Architectural and urban historian Gabriel Schwake has been awarded a Vidi grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). He will investigate how loans, mortgages and other forms of credit helped determine what kinds of homes were built in Amsterdam and Vienna, where they were built and whom they were intended for.
“When you look at any street lined with houses and apartment blocks, you are not only looking at architecture, but also at a whole range of financial decisions. Behind every building are loans and conditions that helped determine what could be built,” says Schwake. “Yet we usually study cities through their buildings and plans, and far less through the financial choices and flows of money that made them possible.”
DEBTSCAPES
In his DEBTSCAPES project, Schwake will therefore examine how finance has shaped the city. “I am turning the perspective around. Instead of starting with a building and then asking how it was financed, I start with the loan. I then look at what that financing produced: which building, which block and, ultimately, which part of the city.”
Schwake focuses on the interwar period (1918–1938), when governments became increasingly involved in financing housing construction. He compares Amsterdam and Vienna, two cities that made different choices in their use of public and private loans.
To do this, he combines sources that are normally studied separately. Mortgage registers, credit records and loan deeds are linked to cadastral data and architectural plans. Using digital maps, he can trace the relationship between finance and urban development across hundreds of building projects. “By linking these sources, I can show how a loan ultimately helped determine what was built at a particular location in the city.”
Relevance of the research
According to Schwake, this historical perspective is particularly relevant today. The close relationship between housing and financial markets is often seen as a development of recent decades, but he argues that the process began around a century ago. Understanding that history can also reveal more clearly how financial choices continue to shape the development of cities over the long term.
“Debt has been a driving force behind the development of the city and has helped determine which homes were built. Financing still plays a major role today in deciding what gets built, for whom and at what price. This Vidi gives me the opportunity to map that history on a large scale for the first time and to better understand how financial choices have shaped our cities.”