Property of the Leisured Classes or Leisure of the Propertied Classes?

Money may make the world go round but property sustains the economy

That could be a - caricatured - slogan of the complex relationship of property and leisure.

Property is, however, a deeper and more fundamental facet of our socioeconomic existence than is often realised. At a visceral psychological and anthropological level, place matters - nesting seems to be written into the human genetic barcode.

This nesting behaviour can also be seen in our leisure time as we appropriate places for a range of activities that would seen bizarre to any alien creature from a parallel universe.

Yet, paradoxically, property and leisure excite moral opprobrium from a number of groups and individuals.

The Peruvian development economist Hernando de Soto received death threats from the Maoist-influenced guerilla group Shining Path for suggesting that property right contracts would help alleviate poverty in his country.

For Shining Path and others, the bestowing of property rights are at the root of the evils of capitalism.

Yet property rights precede capitalism as both David Ricardo and Karl Marx demonstrated.

Creative Commons Image Michael Foley Photography under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
The second home dream: a cottage in Brittany

The Scottish political philosopher David Hume influenced the later idea of the “tragedy of the commons” in which common land becomes congested and unproductive as more and more use is made of it.

Without some allocation of property rights – whether public or private – then common land will deteriorate, as de Soto tried to show in regard to squatting on land in Latin America.

Similarly, there is a residue of biblical aversion to leisure based on the edict that man should labour for six days and rest on the Sabbath.

It is rumoured that H.G.Wells each year bought tickets on the London-Paris boat train intending to take a holiday. He would turn up at Victoria Station, watch his train depart and return home on the basis that the expectation was far superior to the reality.

His science-fiction contemporary, Jules Verne was influenced by Thomas Cook’s first round the world tourist holiday to write Around the World in 80 Days. These cultural influences are important, but as we have got wealthier, we work less time but seek productive labour in our leisure time. So much so, in fact, that we appear to live more in a leisure economy rather than a production one.

In fact, that is in part because leisure has become commodified like everything else. For example 40% of London’s Gross National Product (GDP) is accounted for by hotels, catering and transport.

According to the market intelligence company Datamonitor, the global hotels, restaurants & leisure industry generated total revenues of $2.14 trillion in 2008 (about the same size as the UK economy), representing a compound annual growth rate of 5% for the period 2004-2008.

Moreover, property is central to the leisure sector’s activities, whether in the form of hotels, airports and aircraft, theme parks and leisure complexes, gardening centres and DIY sheds, theatres and festivals sites among many many others.

Globally, tourism, whether sustainable or not, is central to economic development and is an important driver of real estate development and its costs and benefits.

Moreover there is a large reserve army of leisure workers seasonally swarming around the globe, in worker, drone and queen bee roles who have to be accommodated. For a famous 19th century French anarchist, property may equal theft but increasingly it equals leisure.

In his disputes with David Ricardo over the theory of rent, Karl Marx showed that land is a fixed and circulating form of capital. In the latter, circulating, case we are talking about how changes in the value of fixed land can be turned into a flow of revenue.

Thus property and changes in its value is a crucial part of balance sheets of companies. So the use and management of property is endemic to business, and especially for the leisure sector.

In Northern Europe, we have seen a shift away from the traditional two-week beach holiday, to city breaks and cultural excursions.

Our fascination with cities old and new, whether Calatrava’s Valencia or Haussmann’s Paris, cuts across our working and leisure time as billions of us commute into the world’s metropolises each day, whist simultaneously being leisurely flaneurs of their form and content.

Furthermore, despite a digital age, international firms still cluster into the world’s largest metropolises to do business and are important patrons of the architecture and shape of the built environment: witness the Al-Burj Tower in Dubai, the world’s tallest building.

Moreover, property is the root cause of all financial crises, as the recent sub-prime mortgage one has so amply demonstrated.

When I was growing up my family took two week holidays with relatives during the “Paisley Fair”, when all the local factories in this Scottish town closed down for two weeks and migrated to the west coast resorts. There was also the Renfrew and Glasgow Fairs, but essentially one form of property was being exchanged for another form under the guise of changing activities.

Conspicuous consumption has always gone hand in hand with conspicuous leisure as the economist and sociologist, Thorsten Veblen clearly demonstrated in his renowned book, Theory of the Leisured Classes.

For the contemporary leisured classes a second home abroad is seen as a social imperative. But you have to be part of the propertied classes in order to afford this form of leisure.

Leisure and class; class and leisure: it still seems part of the same old propertied story.

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Watch Evan Davis on the leisure illusion