Financialization, even contested, is a major focus of contemporary urban studies. The growing interest of institutional investors in real estate investments has been the subject of in-depth analyses that have suggested the need to critically examine their weight in contemporary urban production. Have investors become the new masters of the urban fabric, to the detriment of historical players such as property developers or local authorities? This article informs the discussion by looking at developers at work and identifying how financial profitability calculations could have invaded their activities. Based on a qualitative survey conducted in France on practising or retired professionals, it shows that there has actually been a surprising degree of stability in professional practices over the past 50 years, even though the economic environment changed at the beginning of the 1990s. Since the origins of the property development sector in France, the real estate firms have had close ties with the financial industry and have been using financial instruments. This is why they were considered as ‘financial natives’, while employees at the operational level remain outside the scope of the colonization of organizations by financial quantifications. The specific nature of real estate work, particularly its political component, means that decisions lower down in these companies cannot be guided solely by financial ratios. The extent of the changes triggered by the massive arrival of financial investments has not been as great as it may seem, since developers appear to have maintained most of their ability to influence contemporary urban governance.

中文翻译：

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金融本地人：工作中的房地产开发商

金融化，即使是有争议的，也是当代城市研究的一个主要焦点。机构投资者对房地产投资日益增长的兴趣已成为深入分析的主题，这些分析表明需要批判性地审查他们在当代城市生产中的权重。投资者是否已成为城市结构的新主人，损害了房地产开发商或地方当局等历史参与者的利益？本文通过查看工作中的开发人员并确定财务盈利能力计算如何侵入他们的活动来为讨论提供信息。根据在法国对执业或退休专业人员进行的定性调查，它表明在过去 50 年中，职业实践实际上具有惊人的稳定性，尽管经济环境在 1990 年代初发生了变化。自房地产开发部门起源于法国以来，房地产公司与金融业有着密切的联系，并一直在使用金融工具。这就是为什么他们被视为“金融本地人”，而运营级别的员工仍然处于财务量化组织的殖民范围之外。房地产工作的特殊性质，尤其是其政治成分，意味着这些公司的决策不能仅以财务比率为指导。金融投资的大规模到来所引发的变化程度并不像看起来那么大，因为开发商似乎保持了他们影响当代城市治理的大部分能力。