Cities and the super rich real estate, elite practices and urban political economies (the contemporary city)

Ray Forrest • Sin Yee Koh • Bart WissinkEditorsCities and the Super-Rich Real Estate, Elite Practices, and Urban Political Economies... viii CONTENTSPart II Elite Spatialities and Prac

CITIES AND THE SUPER-RICH

Real Estate, Elite Practices,

and Urban Political Economies

edited by

RAY FORREST

SIN YEE KOH

BART WISSINK

The Contemporary City

Series Editors

Ray Forrest

City University of Hong Kong Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong Richard Ronald

University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In recent decades cities have been variously impacted by neoliberalism, economic crises, climate change, industrialization and post-industrializa-tion and widening inequalities So what is it like to live in these contem-porary cities? What are the key drivers shaping cities and neighborhoods?

To what extent are people being bound together or driven apart? How do these factors vary cross-culturally and cross nationally? This book series aims to explore the various aspects of the contemporary urban experience from a strongly interdisciplinary and international perspective With edi-tors based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong the series is drawn on an axis between old and new cities in the West and East

We are seeking book proposals from across the social sciences but ipate a core audience rooted in critical approaches in sociology, human geography, anthropology and political science Economic issues are a key concern but our interest lies more with political economy and non-ortho-dox economics New scholars are particularly welcome to contact the edi-tors with ideas for books

antic-More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14446

Ray Forrest • Sin Yee Koh • Bart Wissink

EditorsCities and the

Super-Rich

Real Estate, Elite Practices, and Urban Political

Economies

The Contemporary City

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54834-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959012

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Editors

Ray Forrest

City University of Hong Kong

Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Sin Yee Koh

Institute of Asian Studies

University Brunei Darussalam

Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

Bart Wissink City University of Hong Kong Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

This book grew out of a two-day workshop hosted by the Urban Research Group at the City University of Hong Kong on 15–16 January 2015 The editors would like to acknowledge the financial and logistical support provided by the Department of Public Policy This enabled us to bring together a small international and interdisciplinary group of scholars and

to engage in an intense but informal debate around cities and the super- rich in a round-table setting Some of the research for the book was also supported by a grant from the ESRC/RGC Joint Research Scheme spon-sored by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom (Project reference no: ES/K010263/1)

1 In Search of the Super-Rich: Who Are They?

Ray Forrest, Sin Yee Koh, and Bart Wissink

2 Elites Without Hierarchies: Intermediaries, ‘Agency’

William Davies

Part I Real Estate Investments 39

3 Real Estate Holdings Among the Super-Rich in

Richard A Benton, Lisa A Keister, and Hang Young Lee

4 The Super-Rich and Transnational Housing Markets:

Asians Buying Australian Housing 63Chris Paris

5 Becoming a Super-Rich Foreign Real Estate Investor:

Globalising Real Estate Data, Publications and Events 85Dallas Rogers

viii CONTENTS

Part II Elite Spatialities and Practices 105

6 Beyond the City: Exploring the Maritime

Geographies of the Super-Rich 107Emma Spence

7 Reviving Transnational Elite Sociality: Social

Yannan Ding

8 Old Money, Networks and Distinction: The Social

and Service Clubs of Milan’s Upper Classes 147Bruno Cousin and Sébastien Chauvin

9 Arts and the Super-Rich: Emerging Relations in

Sarina Wakefield

Part III Urban Political Economies 187

10 Selling the Tokyo Sky: Urban Regeneration and 

12 Tycoon City: Political Economy, Real Estate and the

Bart Wissink, Sin Yee Koh, and Ray Forrest

CONTENTS ix

13 Minimum City? The Deeper Impacts of the

‘Super-Rich’ on Urban Life 253Rowland Atkinson, Roger Burrows, Luna Glucksberg,

Hang Kei Ho, Caroline Knowles, and David Rhodes

14 Hyper-Divided Cities and the ‘Immoral’ Super-Rich:

Ray Forrest, Sin Yee Koh, and Bart Wissink

Rowland Atkinson is Research Chair in Inclusive Societies at the Department of

Urban Studies, University of Sheffield He is an urban sociologist with interests in poverty, wealth and crime in city contexts His work has focused on diverse aspects

of neighbourhood change including social exclusion and area effects, the role of the wealthy and middle-classes in cities via his work on gentrification, gated com- munities and, more recently, the very wealthy The primary focus of his work is to engage with less visible social problems and questions of exclusion, segregation and social harms more broadly.

Richard A. Benton is Assistant Professor of Labor and Employment Relations at

the University of Illinois His research focuses on economic sociology,

organisa-tions, social capital and social networks His recent publications appear in Social

Forces and Research in the Sociology of Work.

Roger Burrows is Professor of Cities in the School of Architecture, Planning and

Landscape at Newcastle University, UK. Prior to this, he was Professor of Sociology and Pro-Warden for Interdisciplinary Development at Goldsmiths, University of London He has published almost 150 articles, chapters, books and reports on various topics throughout his career.

Sébastien Chauvin is a sociologist and an associate professor at the Centre en

Etudes Genre of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland His interests include economic sociology, international migration, citizenship, gender, and sexuality His recent work with Bruno Cousin investigates the cultural dimensions of class inequality.

Bruno Cousin is an assistant professor of sociology at Sciences Po and a researcher

at the Centre d’Etudes Européennes, Paris His research stands at the intersection

xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

between urban sociology, the analysis of social inequality, and cultural sociology and focuses mainly on upper and upper-middle classes.

William Davies is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and

Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre He is the author of The

Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Sage,

2014) and The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us

Wellbeing (Verso, 2015).

Yannan  Ding is an Assistant Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University He

earned his PhD in geography at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2012 His main area of

interest is historical geography of the city He has published several pieces in Social

& Cultural Geography, Journal of Historical Geography, and with Routledge and

Springer His first book (first co-editor) is going to be publsihed by Palgrave shortly Currently, he is a Swire-Cathay Pacific visiting academic at St Anthony’s College, University of Oxford.

Ray  Forrest is Chair Professor of Housing and Urban Studies and Head of

Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong He is also Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies at the University of Bristol He has published widely on urban political economy, urban sociology and housing studies Current research includes work on the Chinese city, neighbourhoods and mobility and housing policy in the neoliberal era Recent books have focused on the uneven impact of the ‘global’ financial crisis on households and on intergenerational ten- sions around housing.

Luna Glucksberg is a Researcher at the International Inequalities Institute of the

London School of Economics (LSE) She is an urban anthropologist working on socio-economic stratification in contemporary British society Her current inter- ests are the reproduction of wealth amongst global elites, considering the roles of two key and so far under-researched actors: family offices and women Prior to joining the LSE III, Luna gained her degree from UCL and PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London She then joined the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) as a Research Associate at Goldsmiths, where she maintains a Fellowship She sits on an Advisory Board for Transparency International (TI) UK and has contributed to both blogs and national newspaper articles on issues related

to the elites.

Yosuke Hirayama is Professor of Housing and Urban Studies at the Graduate

School of Human Development and Environment, Kobe University, Japan, ing extensively in the areas of housing and urban change, home ownership and social inequalities, as well as comparative housing policy His work has appeared in numerous international and Japanese academic journals and he is a co-editor of

work-Housing and Social Transition in Japan (Routledge).

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Hang Kei Ho is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Economic

Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden He previously worked in the UK in sociology as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of York, and Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London His current research themes include the geographies of consumption in relation to cultural identity, global alcohol industry with a specific focus on wine consumption in Hong Kong, the changing identity of Hong Kong with respect to mainland China and the West, and the super-rich and the flow of capital from South East Asia to UK’s property market He obtained his PhD from University College London in

Geography; the thesis is titled Drinking Bordeaux in the ‘new’ Hong Kong:

Exploring changing identities through alcohol consumption Before academia, he has

worked in education, real estate consultancy, IT and engineering.

Lisa A. Keister is Gilhuly Family Distinguished Professor of Sociology She is a

faculty affiliate of the Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute, the Center for the Study

of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences, and the Duke Population Research Institute Keister’s research spans multiple subfields including economic sociology, social stratification and mobility, organisations and work, religion, immigration and Chinese studies She has published four academic books and one textbook, has two books in contract, and has edited (or co-edited) four volumes Her papers have appeared in many top sociology journals.

Caroline  Knowles is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban and Community

Research (CUCR) and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London She is the author of many books and papers on urbanism, ethnicity, race and the circulations of people (as migrants) and of objects composing contempo-

rary globalisation Her recent books include Flip-Flop: A Journey through

Globalisation’s Backroads, published by Pluto Press, 2014, www.flipfloptrail.com ;

Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys, with Douglas Harper,

pub-lished by the University of Chicago Press, 2009; Making Race Matter, with Claire Alexander, published by Palgrave, 2005; Picturing the Social Landscape: Visual

Methods and the Sociological Imagination, with Paul Sweetman, published by

Routledge, 2004, (and translated into Japanese 2012); Race and Social Analysis, published by Sage, 2003; and Bedlam on the Streets, published by Routledge,

2000.

Sin Yee Koh is Assistant Professor in Geography in the Institute of Asian Studies

at University Brunei Darussalam Her research, positioned at the intersection of migration studies and urban studies, is informed by three areas of interests: (1) postcolonial geography and colonial legacies; (2) migration/mobilities and citi- zenship; and (3) urbanisation, inequality and social change She is the author of

Race, Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and A Culture of Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Hang Young Lee is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Sociology at

Duke University His areas of research span income and wealth inequality, social stratification and mobility, social capital, social network analysis and economic

sociology His recent publications include articles in Social Currents and Journal of

European Social Policy and chapters in Social Capital and Its Institutional Contingency (Routledge, 2014).

Chris Paris, FAcSS, is Emeritus Professor of Housing Studies, Ulster University

He has held senior academic posts in the UK and Australia and was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Housing, Urban & Regional Planning at Adelaide University in 2013 and 2014 He is the author of 30 books, monographs and research reports and over 100 journal publications, mainly in urban studies and

housing, including Affluence, Mobility and Second Home Ownership (Routledge,

2011).

Choon-Piew Pow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the

National University of Singapore His research focuses broadly on critical phies of the urban built environment and in particular examining how diverse urban forms shape the social and spatial reproduction of urban life in Asian cities His ongoing research projects revolves around gated communities and urban seg- regation; ‘eco-cities’ and contested notions of urban sustainability and more gen- erally the globalisation of urban planning.

geogra-David Rhodes is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Housing Policy, University

of York His primary research interests encompass aspects of social policy and housing provision and consumption as they relate to privately rented housing The variation and geography of local housing markets, in both contemporary and his- torical contexts, has been a theme of his research Much of his work has utilised quantitative methods and GIS techniques to explore secondary sources of data.

Dallas Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of

Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney His research focuses on a relational examination of housing poverty and wealth in globalising cities His projects investigate the relationships between globalising urban space, discourse and technology networks, and housing poverty and wealth He is the

author of The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights

(2016, Rowman and Littlefield International).

Emma  Spence is a PhD candidate at the School of Planning and Geography,

Cardiff University In her thesis, she explores the motivations, frictions and mances of super-rich maritime mobility.

perfor-Sarina  Wakefield is an Adjunct Lecturer in the College of Arts and Creative

Enterprises at Zayed University (Dubai Campus) She has lectured at UCL Qatar and has worked on museum and heritage projects in the United Kingdom and the

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xv

Kingdom of Bahrain Her research interests center on critical heritage studies and museology of the Gulf She has a particular interest in ‘trans-national’ identity and globalization, and migrant heritage in the Gulf She has published work in inter- national journals and books relating to the museums and heritage sector in the

Gulf, which include the co-edited volume Museums in Arabia: Transnational

Practices and Regional Processes (Exell and Wakefield, London & New York:

Routledge, 2016) She received her BSc in Archaeology and her MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester (UK) and her PhD from the Open University (UK).

Bart Wissink is Associate Professor in Urban Studies and Urban Policy at the

Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong His research focuses on enclave urbanism in five Asian city regions (Bangkok, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo), with special attention for comparative urban form, urban controversies, social networks and the neighbourhood, and urban inequalities He has held visiting appointments in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Tokyo.

AGO Auditor-General’s Office

AIG American International Group

BFC Business and Financial Centre

BRIC Brazil, Russia, India and China

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa

CEO Chief executive officer

CIES Capital Investment Entrant Schemes

FDI Foreign direct investment

FIRB Foreign Investment Review Board

FIS Financial Investor Scheme

GDP Gross domestic product

GFC Global financial crisis

HKSAR Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

HNWI High net worth individuals

HRSCE House of Representatives Standing Committee on EconomicsHSBC Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation

IDX Internet Data Exchange

IMWI Internationally-mobile wealthy individual

I.T Information technology

JNR Japan National Railways

LDP Liberal Democratic Party

LPS Luxury Property Showcase

LTSV Long Term Social Visit Pass

MAS Monetary Authority of Singapore

MTI Ministry of Trade and Industry

xviii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NRI Non-resident Indian

OLS Ordinary least-squares

PAC Public Accounts Committee

PR Permanent Resident

PRC People’s Republic of China

QMA Qatar Museums Authority

RAS Royal Asiatic Society

RETS Real Estate Transaction Standard

SARS Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

SCCCCI Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and IndustrySCF Survey of Consumer Finances

SCPL Sentosa Cove Pte Ltd

SCS Singapore Club in Shanghai

SDC Sentosa Development Corporation

SEE Special Economic Envoy

SSBA Shanghai Singapore Business Association

TMG Tokyo Metropolitan Government

TNC Transnational corporation

UAE United Arab Emirates

UHNWI Ultra high net worth individuals

Fig 5.1 Global property seminar, 2014 SMART investment &

Fig 7.1 The Ambassy club is located in a historical quarter

Fig 10.1 Location of high-rise condominium blocks,

Fig 10.2 Floor-area-ratio regulation relaxation districts and

redevelopment priority designated by Urban

list of figures

Table 4.1 FIRB approvals by country of investors 1995–96, 2004–05

list of tAbles

In Search of the Super-Rich: Who Are They?

Where Are They?

Ray Forrest, Sin Yee Koh, and Bart Wissink

Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

S Y Koh

Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam,

Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

B Wissink

Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong,

Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

The work described in this introduction was substantially supported by a grant from the ESRC/RGC Joint Research Scheme sponsored by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom (Project reference no.: ES/K010263/1).

Backcloth

A variation on the apocryphal exchange between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway could go something like this: ‘The super-rich are dif-ferent from you and me’ ‘Yes, they have even more money than the rich’ But much of the rapidly accumulating literature on this group would sug-

gest that the difference extends well beyond material wealth The rich are often represented as an exotic other, a species occupying a parallel universe of privilege, disconnected from the everyday lives of the masses and serviced by a set of domestic flunkies and parasitic advisors Some sug-gest that their innate gifts of energy, vision and creativity set them apart from the herd—and in some cases that may well have some credence Others vehemently criticize this notion of the ‘deserving rich’ as justifica-tion for growing inequalities (Bauman, 2013; Dorling, 2014; Rowlingson

super-& Connor, 2011; Sayer, 2015; Stiglitz, 2012)

While there is a rather voyeuristic genre of popular media studies that allow us to catch an occasional glimpse of these super-rich creatures as they navigate their secretive, premier social and spatial routes, there is also a more aggressive and condemnatory literature which emphasizes their greedy, self-serving and amoral qualities Reflecting on these two literatures, elsewhere

we have argued that, taken as a whole, the super-rich literature tends to overstress agency at the expense of structure—indulging in vilification or celebration in equal measures (Koh, Wissink, & Forrest, 2016) However,

as this book seeks to demonstrate, elite practices and materialities are highly varied and, moreover, the super-rich elites are part of a complex infrastruc-ture of rules and intermediaries which support, and are supported by, their activities (Davies, 2014; Forrest & Wissink, 2016; Koh & Wissink, 2015; Koh et al., 2016) In that sense, it is erroneous to construct them as a special elite group completely divorced from the less privileged world To be sure, the ultra-wealthy have common needs which they can satisfy in elite ways, but they are still embedded in, rather than separated from, a network of ser-vants, services and the often mundane aspects of everyday life A network of intermediaries ties the super-rich tightly to the global power points: cities at the crossroads of the information and financial flows of networked capital-ism This takes us to the distinctive theme of this book, namely, cities and the super-rich We shall return to that connection in a moment

There is another temporal dimension to the super-rich debate Why now? There have always been extremely wealthy people around, on their country estates, and particularly in the major world cities; so why this cur-rent re-emergence of interest in those at the extreme end of the income and wealth spectrum? First, and closely connected to the global cities liter-ature (Sassen, 1991), is the extremely visible extravagance, the particularly conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 1899) of this growing minority There

is nothing new about extreme inequalities: there is a well- established nomics literature on wealth distributions and wealth dynamics and vari-ous sociological and popular texts on privileged elites Lundberg’s (1968)

eco-2 R FORREST ET AL.

treatise, which is generally acknowledged to have introduced the term

‘super-rich’, was a sustained polemic with chapter titles such as ‘The Great Tax Swindle’ and ‘Oligarchy by Default’ But at the time it was a relatively isolated analysis compared to the wave of publications on the topic over the last decade with researchers devoting considerable attention to the consumption practices of those with extreme wealth (see Koh et al., 2016 for an overview) This growing popularity and analytical interest reflects the inescapable evidence of everyday life that there has been a marked redistribution towards the top across a wide range of societies, while also sounding the alarm about a ‘second gilded age’ (Short, 2013) The mar-ket for extreme luxury goods—elite sports cars, super yachts, private jets, art—has been booming Competition among the super- rich has driven

up the price of ‘extreme positional goods’ and ‘Veblen goods’ (Kapner

& Passariello, 2014) Moreover, the dominant ideology of neoliberalism suggests that such explicit enjoyment of material wealth is nothing to be ashamed about Luxury consumption is now in the driving seat of eco-nomic growth—the majority should be thanking the very rich minority for leading the way

Thus, the very visible evidence of widening inequalities, and the renewed concentration of wealth, explains the growing interest among social scientists A more recent political economy literature has, however, added a more forensic and diagnostic dimension to the debate around the super-rich Critical scholars such as Streeck (2014) and Crouch (2004) see the rise of the ultra-wealthy as symptomatic of a deep malaise in contempo-rary capitalist societies Far from indicating an inspirational and sustainable victory for the capitalist class, Streeck (2014, p. 64) argues that oligar-chic redistribution and the trend towards ‘plutonomy’ (and see Freeland, 2012) will depress growth, undermine social cohesion and offer a ‘long and painful period of cumulative decay’ He refers to ‘the nightmare of elites confident that they will outlive the social system that is making them rich’ (2014, p. 59), a group with little if any allegiance to nation states which can grow fat on the global capital market and if necessary ‘cash in, burn bridges and leave nothing behind but scorched earth’ (ibid.) In this

kind of analysis, which pitches capitalism against democracy, the rise of

the super-rich is not a matter for prurient interest, moralizing or simple egalitarian concern Rather it is representative of a structural fault in a financialised, neoliberal capitalism

Here, the super-rich narrative and its close association with tion, ‘the shift in gravity of economic activity from production to finance’ (Foster, 2007), takes us closer to the world of organized and disorganized

financialisa-IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 3

crime—the legitimate and illegitimate super-rich It has been estimated that drug trafficking alone accounts for some 8 per cent of global trade and that money laundering for 2–5 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) (Hall, 2010) Quite evidently, some people have made extremely large amounts of money out of crime It is also evident that ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ activities are closely intertwined The involvement of major banks in money laundering and exchange rate fixing and the off-shoring and tax avoidance machinations of some economic elites con-tribute to the view that clientelism, corruption and various shady, if not outright illegal, practices are inextricably connected to this world of wid-ening inequalities (also see Palan, 2006; Palan, Murphy, & Chavagneux, 2010; Urry, 2014) For example, it is rare these days for an issue of The

Economist not to include at least one report, which exposes some

poten-tially questionable behaviour or business practice of a billionaire, chief executive officer (CEO) or major financier At the time of writing, the lat-

est issue (Economist, 2015) had reported that the richest man in China had

seen his ultra-net worth fall from US$40 to 20 billion and the regulators had stepped in to explore unusual share price movements The same issue also described the long running legal actions by the United States Justice Department on global tax avoidance ‘enablers’ such as HSBC, UBS and Credit Suisse In this context, Dorling (2014, p. 64) has noted that the public ‘now rate bankers along with politician and journalists as by far the most likely among fifteen professional groups not to tell the truth’.All this is not to suggest that criminal behaviour and the acquisition of super-riches are necessarily or even frequently coincidental But the dis-tinction between creative accounting and fraud is a fine one The wide-spread animosity toward economic elites across the world is fuelled by the perception, backed up by considerable daily evidence that the very rich and powerful can play by different rules and get away with it This relates

to Ong’s (2006) ideas of neoliberal exceptionalism and Roy’s (2009) notions of elite informality (see Pow in this book) The major world cities are merely the most significant sites in which these ‘not so formal’ rules are played out in very visible spaces of exception

Who are the Super-rich?

Initially we considered titling this book, the One Percent City However, as

Dorling (2014, p. 2) observed from 2013 data, in the UK a childless couple with a pre-tax total household income of £160,000 (US$250,000) would qualify as members of the 1 per cent That may be a substantial household

4 R FORREST ET AL.

income, but it is not the stratospheric kind of sums we tend to have in mind when we think of the super-rich Moreover, on that measure many double earning, professional academic households would be included, some of which generate the critiques of the economic elites, and would almost certainly include themselves in the 99 per cent It should also be acknowledged that there are extreme and widening income differentials within the 1 per cent Those in the top one thousandth have enjoyed the most spectacular increases in their incomes in recent decades (Piketty,

2014, pp. 319–320) The majority in the social mainstream may find it of little interest to know that even the extremely wealthy are outclassed by a small elite, but it serves to caution against generalizing about lifestyles and behaviour among the super-rich For example, these kinds of differentials became very evident in the course of our fieldwork in Hong Kong when a local private jet broker commented that there were ‘no super-rich expatri-ates in Hong Kong’ She was in the business of selling jets to the super wealthy, often billionaires The local, expatriate rich simply ranked in the hundred-millions

In simple income terms, therefore, constructing the 1 per cent as the

‘other’ is somewhat problematic Nevertheless, we cannot escape the task

of description and delineation entirely Collins Dictionary offers the stark,

‘exceptionally wealthy’ This ‘exceptionalism’ in the commercial wealth management literature has been progressively broken down into differ-ent segments, with Statista’s ‘Global pyramid of wealth’ for instance dis-cerning ‘millionaires’, ‘centamillionaires’ and ‘billionaires’ (McCarthy, 2015) Most commonly there is reference to high net worth (HNW) and ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals Knight Frank’s (2014) annual wealth report defines UHNW individuals as those with a fortune of at least US$30 million The academic literature has, until recently, adopted similar descriptions partly in recognition that mere millionaires are now rather common and unexceptional It was Piketty (2014), however, who changed the terms of this debate and the definitional framing He also provided something of a counter to arguments that the super economic elite was too small and too elusive to provide a meaningful target for crit-ical attention Davies (2014), had for example, argued that if this was

a new type of class warfare it was of a very different kind in which the oppressive class were notable by their absence from the battlefield We were ‘chasing shadows’: ‘Targeting the ‘1 %’ only confirms the frustra-tion of our current predicament: the culprits are so few as to be virtually invisible Traditional class warfare this is not’ In dividing the rich into different percentile groups Piketty showed, however, that we are not just

IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 5

talking about a few extremely wealthy people who made little difference

in the scheme of things—quite the contrary Using tax records, he found that the 0.1 per cent who ‘apparently possess fortunes in the order of 10 million Euros on average’ represent some 4.5 million adults globally—the size of a substantial city; while the wealthiest 1 per cent, with ‘about 3 million Euros apiece on average’ account for some 45 million people—the population of a reasonably sized country (Piketty, 2014, p. 438)

Piketty, therefore, offered a straightforward definitional approach towards the super-rich based on wealth distributions The advantage of this approach is that it does not assume any particular set of characteristics

or behavioural traits nor draw a line between the super-rich and the rest based on some arbitrary number The individuals who fall in the top 1 per cent or 0.1 per cent may all be very wealthy but may be quite differenti-ated in terms of their actual wealth, behaviours, lifestyles, demographic characteristics and how their wealth was acquired and deployed Here, we could contrast the footloose nature of finance with the potentially more localized base for more traditional sectors such as real estate From this perspective, the power and status of the super-rich have to be empirically and discursively constructed in a particular social and economic milieu The question is therefore not whether individuals have incomes or assets sufficiently large to join some absolute universal category but whether they can be reasonably regarded (and are perceived) as part of a privileged economic elite in their local milieu

This definitional discussion inevitably links to the question of whether the super-rich can be conceived of as a coherent social class Contrary to previous representations of a socially mobile capitalism, it has been argued that we now have an entrenched marginalized underclass and reprole-tarianizing middle class (Dorling, 2014) This would be consistent with Piketty’s argument that the patrimonial middle classes may appear to have escaped from their working class roots but their mainly residential wealth

is merely a few ‘crumbs off the table’ The capitalist class has reasserted its dominance In the second chapter, Davies addresses this issue head on when he asks, ‘what do they want?’ Leaving aside Davies’ exploration of this question, one response might be that the super-rich do not have a single material base This would be consistent with the points made previ-ously that we need to pursue this question empirically and stress potentially more fluid identities It may be that beyond the tabloid representations and stereotypes, we need to acknowledge the diversity of economic elites and the existence of multiple coalitions without a coherent class character

6 R FORREST ET AL.

We can therefore see a number of different approaches to this tional issue Tabloid representations (and some academic) are generally of the ‘lifestyles of rich and famous’ variety in which certain common charac-teristic and behaviours are assumed and presented Then there is the more sober empirical and economic approach in which no common traits or behaviours are assumed beyond the fact that these individuals or families are within the 1 per cent or 0.1 per cent by income and/or wealth (e.g Piketty, 2014) But there is also another approach which explores their discursive construction and the extent to which ‘they’ are so different from ‘us’ From this theoretical vantage point, the super-rich are simply further along the scale from most of us—the differences are more quantitative than qualita-tive Here, we conceive of contemporary social structures more in terms of continuities than discontinuities Thurlow and Jaworski’s (2014, p. 177) work on the social semiotics of elite tourism explores the way in which all consumers are implicated to varying degrees in this discursive construction

defini-of luxury branding and elite consumerism As they argue, ‘elitism is more than simply a material or economic reality; it is also an aspirational ideal in relation to which all consumer-citizens, regardless of their wealth or power, are constantly persuaded and taught to position themselves’ They make the point that those lapping up the positional status of elite eco-tourism or discovering the next undiscovered island are more likely to be super-rich wannabes The ‘real’ super-rich are already somewhere else Thus, super-richness is often discursively constructed through the practices in specific social settings of those who aspire to the marketed imagery of the super-

rich lifestyle—think one-percentism rather than one-percentness.

Where are the Super-rich?

So where are the super-rich? One answer to this question, as we have hinted, is: probably somewhere else They are defined by the absence

of co-presence Some argue that following earlier moves of disaffiliation

by the urban middle classes, the super-rich are not among us (Atkinson, 2006; Atkinson et al in this book; Koh, Wissink, & Forrest, 2015; Watt, 2009) They move in different worlds along privileged pathways They are off land in their super yachts (see Spence in this book), their assets are offshore, and if they are not at sea they are in their private jets or luxury penthouses Mobility and invisibility therefore come to mind when

we think of the economic elite Wherever they are, they are in transit— moving between homes or business meetings Even their non-liquid

IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 7

assets—art treasures, vintage cars, rare gems or whatever—are on the move and out of reach, never quite getting anywhere One symptom of the growth in the number of extremely rich people is the expansion of freeports as tax havens and repositories of high value assets (Palan, 2006; Palan et  al., 2010; Urry, 2014; and see Wakefield in this book) The

Economist (2013) described them as ‘über-warehouses for the ultra-rich’,

functioning as upmarket storage facilities as well as business places where the super- rich can ‘rub shoulders and trade fine objects with each other’ without technically being in any particular country

This is at least one version of the locational habits and trajectories of the contemporary economic elite The freeports are, of course, real enough; but as we have suggested, the assumed hypermobility of super-rich indi-viduals and families requires closer empirical investigation Age, gender, household composition and other socio-demographics impact on house-hold choices and strategies, regardless of wealth Moreover, notions of place attachment and sense of belonging should not be assumed to be only the preoccupations of the poor and less wealthy

Recalling Streeck’s (2014) earlier views, do they all fit the profile of high-end nomads of the global capital markets—the ‘internationally- mobile wealthy individuals (IMWIs)’ (EIU & RBC Wealth Management,

2012, p. 3)—who drift between multiple homes and luxury hotels with tle regard for particular contexts or cultures? For example, earlier research

lit-on eclit-onomic elites and more parochial typologies of middle class ity (Bell, 1968; Savage & Williams, 2008) would suggest that we cannot assume that those occupying positions in Piketty’s 1 per cent or 0.1 per cent are all global ‘spiralists’—some may be closer to the idea of the local worthy with longstanding family commitments to a particular city The popular press conveys the image of a group of nomadic domicile changers

mobil-or ‘habitual country hoppers’ (Barclays, 2014, p. 7) with little ment to place or community But the majority of the wealthy elite may

commit-be quite sedentary, at least in terms of their main residence Children are certainly likely to be sent off for an overseas education, particularly among the rich elite based outside Europe, Australasia and North America, but relatively few seem to seek a more permanent change of domicile According to Knight Frank’s (2014) Wealth Report, those advising the super-rich think that some 10–15 per cent of their clients are considering

a permanent change of domicile The exception is Russia where ently 37 per cent are thinking of doing so At the other extreme, only 6 per cent of UK-based super-rich are looking for a long-term relocation

appar-8 R FORREST ET AL.

However, given that the UK is the most favoured destination this may not

be surprising

But while the UK is evidently particularly super-rich friendly, the tions for relocating among the ultra-wealthy are not simply tax or business driven In fact, everyday considerations such as desiring a better climate, better education for children and emotional attachments to countries

motiva-of origin are equally significant (Barclays, 2014) Security is predictably more of an issue for the wealthy elite in less stable political environments (Knight Frank, 2014) Again, these factors will vary enormously: cultur-ally, geographically and in relation to the life course Life course stage and household structure will also impact on general locational choice, as for all households Super-rich households with children of school age will have a different frame of reference compared with empty nester elite households For example, one wealthy expatriate couple in Hong Kong explained to

us that having children had grounded them: they were minimizing their travels, and the city was now their settled home University education is, however, likely to involve a different set of considerations compared to secondary schooling: the UK may be favoured for schooling but the USA

is preferred for elite tertiary education Country living is highly venient for families with school age children Whilst the super-rich are likely to own a property in the countryside, they are typically urbanites The European ultra-wealthy are most likely to favour a rural location for their main residence (22 per cent) but some 90 per cent are city dwell-ers (Knight Frank, 2014) According to Richard Florida (2015), in terms

incon-of the number incon-of people with assets incon-of US$30 million or more, London

is the top location followed by Tokyo, Singapore, New York and Hong Kong

citieS and the Super-richThis takes us to the main focus of this book, namely the urban domain Urban studies have more typically been preoccupied with poor people and poor neighbourhoods The rich elite, however, has always been pres-ent and acknowledged (see for instance Zorbaugh, 1929): historically, the ultra-wealthy were associated with big civil projects and philanthropic good works In the contemporary literature they are more likely to be associated with the movers and shakers of the entrepreneurial city or sim-ply exotic decorations on the urban landscape They might be popularly condoned or condemned for their extreme wealth, but for a long time

IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 9

they were not considered a social phenomenon of sufficient interest or importance to be of academic or policy concern.

One reason for the increased interest, as we have argued, is the sheer number of the super-rich The structural and institutional changes out-lined previously have increased the scale, scope and thus the presence of extreme wealth And the super-rich are most visible as consumers of urban space and services in the so-called global cities—the alpha cities of London, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore, Paris, as well as secondary niche cities such as Geneva, Zurich or Monaco (Florida, 2015) The global cities literature has mainly focused on the structural changes associated with urban economies dominated by advanced producer and financial ser-vices and the consequent changes in income structures, notably the poten-tial polarization between highly paid professionals and lowly paid workers

in the service sectors (Hamnett, 1994; Sassen, 1991) This is an issue to which we will return in the concluding chapter at the end of this book.The ‘alpha territorialization’ of particular parts of leading cities has, however, also attracted considerable media attention in recent years Just

as poor, rundown neighbourhoods and the marginalized lifestyles ated with them offer appealing and accessible narratives for the media,

associ-so too do the images of luxury blocks lying empty or mansions left to rot as merely places to park surplus wealth These alpha neighbourhoods have been characterized as dead zones, places where the global super-rich

invest but do not live The Guardian reported that on Bishops Avenue,

or ‘Billionaires Row’, in central London ten mansions ‘have stood almost entirely vacant since they were bought a quarter of a century ago’ (Booth, 2014) It may be difficult to gain an empirically precise account of the full number of empty or hardly occupied luxury apartments or houses

in the centre of major cities but their presence in many cities is obvious The ‘scandal’ is given particular currency because of the growing hous-ing affordability problem facing the middle classes and the lack of social

housing for the poor Indeed, an article in the same issue of The Guardian

noted that local council waiting lists for social housing were being revised

to drastically reduce the number of eligible households (Osborne, 2014) But what has given the issue of super-rich property investment particular traction is not just that the conspicuous consumption (or, indeed, non- consumption) of luxury properties can be juxtaposed with the growing plight of the urban poor in many cities; it is the affordability problems faced by the young professional classes Many middle class households find themselves priced out of property markets, which are being fuelled

10 R FORREST ET AL.

by international investment (see Part III of this book) In this context, Atkinson, Burrows, and Parker (2015) refer to research by Transparency International (2015), which found that some 30,000 London properties are in the hands of secret offshore holdings.

There is also the rather exotic social ‘problem’ of the established local urban rich being displaced by the international super-rich—what has been referred to as the ‘gentrification of gentrification’ (Glucksberg, Atkinson, Butler, & Rhodes, 2015) In an opinion piece on the effects of wealth

inequality in London in Le Monde diplomatique, Atkinson et al (2015)

refer to a kind of polarized resentment towards the purchase of central city properties by the global super-rich The ‘[r]ising social anger (cru-

cially, among the affluent and the excluded) is focused on the inability

of London and its governance system to deliver affordable, good-quality housing…’ This kind of narrative is emerging across a wide range of cit-ies, from Vancouver to Shanghai Moreover, the resentment towards this international rich class buying up the fashionable neighbourhoods is ampli-fied by the view that these people are not only super wealthy but also out-siders—and foreigners to boot (Rogers, Lee, & Yan, 2015) An article in

the South China Morning Post, headlined ‘Born in China, Joy Mo blames

rich mainlanders for Vancouver’s housing woes’, reports on responses to foreign real estate investments in Vancouver (Young, 2013) According

to the piece, ‘Joy Mo, a Vancouver-area resident since 2002, says it is time to do something about the rich mainland Chinese she believes have priced locals like her out of the property markets’ And while Mo is from Mainland China herself, she does not want to be ‘painted with the same brush’ as the super wealthy Mainlanders who are now moving to the city

Similarly, a piece in The Guardian reports on the Cannes property fair

which it describes as ‘an orgy for oligarchs’ where ‘whole swatches of cities are put up for sale to the highest bidder’ (Wainwright, 2014) Local pro-testors were concerned that British local authorities were more interested

in attracting international real estate businesses than addressing housing needs Clearly the super-rich and their real estate investment practices are creating—or are at least perceived to be creating—waves in local housing markets

In thinking about cities and super-rich spaces, we also need to consider impacts on urban morphologies beyond residential consumption The pro-duction and shaping of urban space for and by the super-rich goes beyond places of residence There are the related retail and wholesale services, the spaces of the intermediaries and servant classes and the numer-

IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 11

ous ‘externalities’, which exclusive spaces impose on the non-exclusive There is a lobby to expand private jet airspace and restructure airports accordingly, at the same time that there is a lobby to improve marinas that will attract super yachts And there may be direct investments of the ultra-wealthy on urban hard and soft infrastructure—museums, art galler-ies, schools, and philanthropic projects Moreover, returning to a more porous view of super-rich lifestyles and ‘one percentism’, there are the ripple effects of aspirant elitism through the urban fabric—most notably perhaps in the proliferation of designer shops.

Of course, we also need to consider cities on the margins These are the places off the radar, outside the super-rich narrative, not the places of Florida’s (2002) creative class or Reich’s (1991) symbolic analysts These are not the cities where the super-rich live, do business, or transit through, nor those who study them However, it may be that the impact of elite offshore wealth on urban development is just as significant in cities well outside the alpha territory In Detroit, for example, billionaire owners Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans and Mike Ilitch of Little Caesars Pizza and two Detroit sports teams have bought up considerable chunks of the down-town city on the cheap Their expectation is that the related private invest-ments will transform derelict urban areas into privatized urban zones of safety and comfort, attractive to the professional middle classes, thus gener-ating considerable profits; and the first signs are positive, as this actually has generated a very local real estate boom (Carey, 2013; Moskowitz, 2015).Detroit might be an extreme example; but then again, differences might only be a matter of degree A key question is the extent to which cities around the world—especially their specific prime districts—are being fundamentally restructured for, and by, the super-rich: either to accom-modate their highly diverse and extensive consumption practices; or to support their investments in the production of urban space In the mean-time, governments seem to be either conspicuously absent—as is the case

in Detroit—or actively implicated in these urban transformations with a diversity of entrepreneurial strategies (see part 3 of this book) This brings

us to the contents of this book

the Structure and logic of thiS Book

Following this introductory chapter, William Davies highlights how, under the guise of professional knowledge and services, intermediar-ies play a significant role in insulating the super-rich and their pursuit of

12 R FORREST ET AL.

wealth from political controversy While our introductory chapter maps out the broader contexts of debates on the super-rich by asking who and where are the super-rich and what are their relationships to cities, Davies’ chapter pushes the question of ‘what do the super-rich want?’ In doing so,

he asks if we should approach the super-rich as some kind of social class

As he suggests, however, it might be more productive if we conceptualize the super-rich in reference to networks of agents and intermediaries, and not as a distinct class by itself

The remainder of this book is organized into three parts, covering the themes of real estate investments, elite spatialities and practices, and urban political economies respectively As we have noted, real estate is a sig-nificant source of wealth for the super-rich At the same time, it is also a major source of attention for debates on cities and the super-rich The first part of the book consists of three chapters focusing on the super-rich and real estate investments in the contexts of the United States and Australia Richard Benton, Lisa Keister, and Hang Young Lee’s chapter examines real estate holdings among the super-rich in the United States using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) They argue that the demo-graphic trends of real estate ownership suggest a shift from inherited to new wealth among the super-rich in the United States They also find that top real estate owning households and other wealthy households do not uniformly overlap, suggesting that the super-rich is not a homogenous and uniform group The next two chapters draw empirically from the Australian context Chris Paris examines the changing geography of trans-national residential real estate investments by the super-rich in Australia, and considers what this means for urban studies, housing studies, and mobilities studies Dallas Rogers adopts the concept of ‘electronic medi-ating technologies’ to theorize how various non-state actors—essentially intermediaries—contribute towards an emerging translocal sphere of net-works and systems that shape, govern and regulate super-rich foreign real estate investments in Australia These three chapters collectively under-line the importance of real estate investments in (re)producing super-rich wealth and shaping housing inequality in various cities

The second part of the book shifts the focus to elite spatialities and practices in a range of spaces and places Emma Spence’s chapter explores super-rich lifestyle mobilities in relation to the super yacht industry Her chapter reminds us that super-rich mobilities in part are non-urban;

at the same time, however, mobile practices do moor in cities as well Yannan Ding looks at the revival of elite social clubs in Shanghai through

IN SEARCH OF THE SUPER-RICH: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? 13

a historical perspective He shows that in old Shanghai the clubs were the preserve of an imperialist cultural elite The new clubs, however, while often adopting the old names are more likely to be frequented by those who serve the new Chinese economic elite Implicitly, he thus shows that

in this post- colonial context, there has been a shift from race-centred to class-centred distinctions In a similar vein, Bruno Cousin’s and Sébastien Chauvin’s chapter examines contemporary elite social clubs in Milan Contrary to Yannan Ding’s chapter, they show that in Milan there has been remarkably little change in the constellation of club members The final chapter in this section examines how, by virtue of their wealth and power status, the super-rich shape certain elite spaces Sarina Wakefield explores the production and legitimization of cultural heritage in Dubai

by the super-rich and shows how this is connected to a complex global power network Collectively, these four chapters examine the spatial rela-tionships between elite power status, luxury lifestyles and consumption, and the impacts of elite spatialities and practices on the cities that are hosting the super-rich They offer glimpses into the spatial practices of the super-rich, with implications for our understanding of super-rich mobili-ties and connections within and between cities and places

In the third part, the book culminates in a discussion of the impacts

of the super-rich and their social and real estate investment practices on four cities from a political economy perspective: Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and London The four chapters touch upon the same topics—the super-rich, the urban political economy, and the effects for ‘others’—but each also has specific themes Yosuke Hirayama shows how the develop-ment of exclusive high-rise condominiums in Tokyo should be understood against the background of the changing urban political economy of Japan Discussing the potential effects of this strategy for other Japanese cities,

as well as other social groups in Tokyo, he argues that this is a fragile solution that easily comes at the cost of the non-rich ‘others’ Employing the concepts of ‘spaces of exception’, ‘elite informality’ and ‘spatial fixes’, C.P. Pow discusses the impacts of the super-rich on Singapore He shows how, in the context of a changing Singaporean urban political economy, specialized spaces of exception for the super-rich are related to the accep-tance of elite forms of informality, that make ‘right’ what otherwise might have been wrong Bart Wissink, Sin Yee Koh and Ray Forrest give an overview of the institutionalization of pro-rich policies in Hong Kong’s urban political economy and the related development model They pres-ent domestic and foreign real estate investment as catalysts for building

14 R FORREST ET AL.

programs for luxury housing Undermining an earlier social contract for welfare redistribution, this produces detrimental effects for a majority of non-rich ‘others’, a contributing factor in recent social protests in the city Rowland Atkinson, Roger Burrows, Luna Glucksberg, Hang Kei Ho, Caroline Knowles and David Rhodes discuss the life of the super-rich in the context of the urban political economy of London They interpret London as a minimum city where super-rich investments push the urban poor out, while government policies to defend these others have gone missing Focussing on diverse urban political economies, each of these contributions suggests that the super-rich and their investments align with entrepreneurial government strategies and that the respective urban policies are hardly sufficient to cope with the detrimental effects for non-super-rich others.

In the concluding chapter, we draw together the insights raised in this book We sketch out future research questions and policy implications for growing wealth inequality and super-rich spatialities in contemporary cities

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Who are the super-rich, and what do they want? Are they a new class, and if

so, what type of class are they? One of the few things we know about them,

by definition, is that they have very large amounts of money at their disposal, which, especially in the English-speaking world, has become more con-centrated than at any time since the 1920s (Dorling, 2014; Piketty, 2014) Statistical knowledge of this trend has increased markedly since the global financial crisis which began in 2007, thanks especially to work of Piketty But this highlights some troublesome gaps in our sociological understand-ing, which opens up a host of new empirical and theoretical questions If Piketty’s work leaves a great deal unexplained, one might argue that this

is an opportunity for sociology, rather than a limitation of that particular work (Savage, 2014a)

What do they want to do with all that money, other than to protect it,

grow it and pass it on to their children? Do they want political power, and

if so, of what kind and to what end? Or do they employ it culturally, to achieve their own modes of Bourdieusian distinction from the other 99.9 %? Classical theories of elites stress the overlapping nature of different types

of power and capital, that is, the capacity to convert money into political

power, or political power into money, or cultural capital into income (Mills,

1999; Savage & Williams, 2008) If the super-rich are an ‘elite’ in that Millsian sense, then we should be asking what institutions they are seek-ing to infiltrate, be they political, cultural or military According to such a notion of elites, they will gravitate ultimately towards the state in some way,

in search of power Or if they are a ‘class’ in a classically Marxian sense, then

we should be asking which other class they sit in relation to, who they are

exploiting, and with what tools This requires them to develop some ive, collective self-consciousness, to act in defence of their shared interests.Mike Savage has recently urged sociologists to avoid resorting to some of their favourite tropes when exploring and explaining the super- rich (Savage, 2014b) He notes that one of the few things we do know

reflex-about the super-rich is that they like to reside and keep their wealth in

a small number of urban alpha territories, dotted around the world But beyond that, there are unanswered questions that should provide pause for thought, both methodologically and theoretically

Firstly, Savage suggests that we need to try and take money seriously as money, that is, we should not automatically view it as something to be con-

verted into power We need, he suggests, to avoid the Weberian temptation

to treat elites as fundamentally political, which Mills is symptomatic of To

do this, we need to draw on the sociology of money, to get a handle on what wealth and income of this magnitude might mean and do Secondly,

we should accept the need for descriptive methods (such as Piketty’s, or digital data-mining), rather than immediately dig in search of an underlying causal substrate This means avoiding the Marxian temptation to theorise capital before we have adequately described it, something Piketty manifestly succeeds in doing, to the chagrin of some Marxist critics (Kunkel, 2014).Savage also identifies a couple of fresh theoretical challenges for sociol-

ogy One of these is to adequately name this class, if indeed it is a class

(given that ‘1 %’ is somewhat misleading) If it is not a class, then we need

to classify it in some other way, on the basis of description Another lenge is to theorise what form of openness this ‘class’ has: it seems neither closed like an aristocracy, nor ‘open’ like a meritocracy

chal-To these challenges, we might also add another one, which is familiar

to the study of elites This is the need to avoid wholesale methodological individualism, while recognising the deeply personal and individualised nature of the relationships and strategies that appear to structure the lives

of the super-rich Another of Piketty’s challenges to sociology, Savage suggests, is to turn the focus of political economy upon the family, and

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away from the labour market But this is tricky, methodologically and temologically Knowledge of elites is at best partial, and therefore requires certain measured acts of extrapolation (Bowman et al., 2013), however the case of the super-rich adds further difficulties, in being actively secre-tive in certain respects There is a risk of conspiracy theory, although there

epis-is an equal and opposite repis-isk of ignoring the possibility of conspiracies.This chapter responds to these challenges, and seeks to reorient elite studies in view of the particular problems posed by the super-rich in the early twenty-first century It does so by foregrounding the question of

intermediaries, that is, commercial agents who work on behalf of clients,

so as to represent their public, political, cultural and geographic interests

As I have previously explored, intermediaries—such as consultants, fund managers, credit-raters and auditors—have been at the heart of the crisis

of financial capitalism, a crisis that is as much normative (specifically, the normalisation of ‘fraudulent’ activity) as economic (deflation) (Davies,

substan-tially over recent decades They carry vast responsibility for the very sibility of economic knowledge and regulation, inasmuch as they perform critical work of evaluation and translation within highly complex spheres

pos-of financial and contractual activity And yet, despite this, they have also come to be viewed in reductively economic terms, as private sector actors like any others, hence with less and less sense of ‘vocation’ towards the general socio-economic good This is a dangerous situation

The significance of ‘intermediaries’ can be especially great where urban

real estate is concerned In June 2015, The New Yorker published an

arti-cle entitled ‘House of Secrets’ detailing the lengthy and highly complex investigations that were necessary to identify the owner of Witanhurst, London’s second largest house after Buckingham Palace, sold for £50 mil-lion ($77 million) in 2008 (Caesar, 2015) Chains of ownership (going via offshore tax havens) meant that members of the British public had no way

of knowing who the owner was Nobody working on the massive opment of the property had any knowledge of who was ultimately benefit-ing, while the architect of the development was only ever instructed by agents of the owner, and never knew the ultimate owner’s identity When

redevel-a plredevel-anning redevel-applicredevel-ation wredevel-as lost, redevel-a teredevel-am of expert witnesses wredevel-as redevel-assembled

to ensure this was later overturned Such chains of ownership and teams

of expert agents allowed the ultimate owner or future resident to remain entirely insulated from the vagaries of local politics or culture Witanhurst

is expected to be worth £300 million ($460 million) when complete

ELITES WITHOUT HIERARCHIES: INTERMEDIARIES, ‘AGENCY’ 21

This chapter is in three parts Firstly, responding partly to Savage’s incitement to take money seriously, I put forward the hypothesis, drawing

on Simmel, that the super-rich dwell in a teleological vacuum That is, we

might want to consider that their lack of political project is one of their central characteristics They desire the ‘negative liberty’ that money offers, but to a degree that goes well beyond the guarantees of political liberal-ism or neoliberalism Hence their retreat into private space Secondly, I

suggest that one way we can understand this politically is via the concept

of ‘agency’, as it derives from game theory and neo-classical economics Agency is the phenomenon of one person being contracted to represent the interests of another, arising as a ‘problem’ with the birth of profes-sional management in the late nineteenth century By focusing on ‘agency’

as a pivotal institution or problem, we can begin to respond to some of the challenges that Savage outlines, without simply collapsing everything back into Weberian or Marxian explanations A key reason for this is that

‘agency’ relations are political, without being exploitative or cal Thirdly, I explore how we might view the super-rich today on this basis, and what the key forms of agency might be I argue that traditional sociological classifications and presuppositions—such as those of ‘elites’

hierarchi-or ‘class’—are not adequate fhierarchi-or understanding the highly privatised, vidualised types of power which agents facilitate The chapter concludes

indi-by exploring the nature of the challenge this poses to social science today

Taking The Teleological Vacuum SeriouSly

What do the super-rich want? This is clearly an empirical question, which should not be determined too soon But what if, as a hypothesis, it turns

out they simply want to be and remain super-rich? What if their identity

is simply provided by their very wealth, rather than their capacity to vert that into power or cultural capital, or their capacity to accumulate it through productive exploitation? It is worth exploring the implications of this in terms of the nihilistic, a-teleological nature of devotion to money itself

con-In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel marvels at the bizarre nature of

paper money, both as means of exchange and as wealth Money, as various anthropologists have commented, has a dual character, as both everything and nothing It ‘means more to us than any other object of possession because it obeys us without reservation—and it means less to us because

it lacks any content that might be appropriated beyond the mere form of

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