ABSTRACT

The modern development of private ownership rights was a necessary precondition for nineteenth-century urbanisation. The expansion of European towns – the way in which the 'urban reserves' were filled – took place largely through private land and property investments. It was, at least initially, a decentralised and fairly unregulated process. Naturally, urban property owners have been mentioned and discussed in individual urban monographs and in studies of housing policy and the emerging social question of housing around the year 1900. In a socio-cultural perspective, previous research has directed its intention above all to the relations between the tenant working-class and the landlord middle class. The property owners were at the cross-section of several lines of development in the nineteenth century, which all can be associated with urban modernisation – whether they were social, legal, political, technological or economic by nature.