The Beautiful City and the Rent from Information. Monetary Axiology of the Shape Surplus

This contribution is part of a larger study concerning the Cost Benefit Analysis of the Madrid-Rio Park, one of the main public works in the field of urban redevelopment in Europe over the last twenty years. The scale of the intervention and its effects on the urban arrangement of the Manzanares River area encourage reflections on some issues of the wealth redistribution in the face of such a huge investment amount; in this experimentation we try to stress some fundamental categories of them. The paper focuses on the monetary quantification of secondary benefits coming from the commercial, accommodation, spor ts and catering businesses located in the large areas made free after the burial of the stretch of the motorway once flanking the river. According to the logic of the business plan, a Discounted Cash Flow Analysis was carried out by transforming all items of the income statement into annual revenue and expenditure streams; therefore, the components of the secondary benefit generated, and their composition were analysed in terms of relevance with respect to the possible earners. At the same time, these results were compared with the data on concession fees charged by the Madrid administration and some hypotheses were made regarding the fees applicable to current and future business, by applying the residual value, as a result of risk and scenario analyses, carried out on the strategic variables of the investments. Finally, the overall result – related to all businesses comprised in the areathe area, with regard to the differentiated concession fees applicable for each class of business – was compared with the current management costs of the park, providing one of the possible measurements of the efficiency of the current concessionary policy and indicating any other further potential.