Real estate valuations, heritage branding and the construction of the world’s most expensive city

This paper contributes to Land Value Capture (LVC) research by demonstrating how heritage conservation, typically linked to architectural preservation and cultural memory, can also serve as a fiscal extraction tool. Focusing on Tel Aviv-Jaffa, it traces how the local municipality used the 2008 Conservation Plan to transform heritage policies into financial instruments, legitimising betterment taxes and limiting compensation claims. It examines this process through one of Israel’s largest compensation lawsuits, where property owners challenged the plan’s restrictive measures, prompting the municipality to argue that, despite these restrictions, the conservation policies also branded their buildings, increasing their market value by approximately 5%. Additionally, the paper highlights two underexplored LVC challenges: first, that determining whether property values increase following public interventions is a contested process shaped by selective narratives and strategic framing; second, that even if such increases are assumed, attributing them directly to specific public interventions, rather than broader market dynamics, remains uncertain and contingent. This reflects the paper’s broader empirical argument that valuations are not neutral reflections of economic reality but performative acts of justification, crafted to legitimise fiscal claims and rationalise policy interventions. Together, these findings reveal how Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s transformation into the world’s most expensive city has been structured by contested processes of branding, fiscal justification and selective value creation, demonstrating how urban economies are actively shaped by the strategic deployment of cultural narratives and valuation practices.