Trump, Napoleon III show up in book about development

The Georgia Straight featured a book co-written by Ira Nadel, a UBC English professor and Herb Auerbach, who teaches real-estate development at Simon Fraser University.

The book, called Placemakers: Emperors, Kings, Entrepreneurs—A Brief History of Real Estate Development, examines history through the lens of real-estate development.

“Real estate development has always been, and will always remain, a high-risk, creative process,” the authors wrote. “But we owe our built environment, the good and the bad, to those gutsy, imaginative entrepreneurs and placemakers who, throughout history, took the risks to make real estate development an essential, physical component of the social, cultural and economic texture of our cities.”