Urban struggles with financialization

Abstract

The 2008 financial crisis and its impacts on the urban landscape contributed to a proliferation of research on the financialization of urban space, particularly of housing. Today, financialization is a mainstream focus of study within geography. But while scholars have responded to earlier calls to center space and place in their research, it has only been quite recently that geographers have taken up efforts to politicize and contest the financialization of urban space. This essay assesses the emerging body of literature on urban struggles with financialization. It first draws on historical materialist perspectives to situate financialization within urban contexts, showing why there is a particular relationship between this process and urban space, and how moments of crisis reveal tensions in this relationship. Reviewing literature focused on places exposed to the most systemic housing–financial crises in 2008, the essay then explores how residents, activists, and movements have grappled with financialization. It argues that a key aspect of such struggles is the ability to make their presence felt within chains of financial intermediaries or the corporate headquarters of foreign investors. The essay also highlights how moments of crisis open space for more radical tactics that disrupt the dominant production of space and emphasize the social value of housing. It suggests ways to fruitfully expand geographic inquiry into urban struggles with financialization through focusing on the formation of political subjectivities and engaging geographies beyond the global north.

Geographies of hyper‐commodified housing: foreign capital, market activity, and housing stress

“…These Wurundjeri lands are ‘under heavy and mounting pressure from rapid urban and housing development’ to service both domestic and foreign real estate buyers (Porter & Barry, , p.10). ‘As real estate has become more amenable to capital flows, capital flows have also been rescaled’, Fields argues (, p.4), before suggesting not only that ‘real estate is easily transformed into a liquid and tradable commodity, [but that] capital can also shift “in and out of different types of market in different corners of the globe”’ ( ibid , citing Schoenberger , p.431). As such scholarship shows, both the commodification and financialization of housing have clear spatio‐temporal dimensions that exceed the nation state (Aalbers, , , ; Fields, , ).…”

“…The financialization of housing is a related concept (Aalbers, ; Aalbers, ; Fields, , ). In the broadest sense, the phrase refers to the increasing presence of a range of actors and organisations creating or using real estate management, mortgage, and financial instruments to profit‐seek.…”

One and the Same? A Systematic Literature Review of Residential Property Investor Types

“…In the wider spatial sciences, there is a long tradition of linking spatial scales, often hierarchically articulated (Brenner 2009), to the multiscalar organization of urban space and processes of social reproduction under capitalism (Harvey 1989). This trend is also visible in the burgeoning literature on financialization, in which many scholars focus on the urban scale, but also examine how the process of financialization “concerns and traverses geographical […] scales” (Fields 2017, 2). Our systematic literature review revealed that many authors also differentiate residential property investors according to their spatial scales of operation .…”

“…Scholars argue that the ways in which owner-occupiers approach purchasing a house have shifted from creating a place to live in to being an investment opportunity, turning property-holding citizens “into asset-accumulating investors” (Smith 2008, 520). In many studies, the lived experience of financialization is highlighted (Fields 2017), with individuals exhibiting calculated risks and entrepreneurial logics with regards to home ownership. Gillon and Gibson (2018) focus on the emotional performances and sociomaterial expressions of “investor-occupier subjects,” and Watson (2010, 1466) embeds the “modern investor subject” into a wider shift toward an asset-based welfare system in the UK.…”

Vacancy at the edges of the precarious city

“…The commodification of housing in London and other major cities in the Global North and South has, as many have recently argued, become a defining feature of an intensifying housing crisis (see Aalbers, 2015;Fernandez and Aalbers, 2016;Harvey, 2012;Rolnik, 2013;Minton, 2017). A growing body of scholarship has, in this context, stressed the importance of conceptualising housing as "a socially embedded feature of financial capitalism" (Soederberg, 2018: 114; see also Aalbers, 2011, Fields andUffer, 2014;Fields, 2017;Garcia Lamarca and Kaika, 2016). Particular attention has been paid to the relationship between financialisation and housing insecurity with a focus on the reconfiguration of housing markets in the wake of the global financial crisis and the re-emergence of older practices of expropriation and exploitation in new emboldened forms (Akers and Seymour, 2018: 127; see Desmond, 2016;Roy, 2017, Sassen, 2014.…”