Despite Brexit and Trump, London and New York real estate will remain a safe deposit box for transnational wealth elites

The flow of money from the super-rich or wealth elites into real estate in global cities like London and New York have left analysts wondering whether this is a temporary surge or a deeper transformation of real estate markets. The rebellion against globalization, illustrated by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, makes this an even more pressing issue. Rodrigo Fernandez, Annelore Hofman and Manuel B. Aalbers argue that to understand the geography of wealth elites, we need to look at the underlying mechanisms of global inequality, such offshore finance and the role of global cities as real estate investment locations

Socializing space and politicizing financial innovation/destruction: some observations on Occupy Wall Street

This short paper discusses two issues related to the Occupy Wall Street movement. First, a local urban political geography is presented in which Liberty Plaza is not the accidental place of Occupy Wall Street but a deliberate one, not only because it is located between the towers of global capital, but also because it constitutes a so-called “privately owned public space” (POPS). Second, a global financial political geography is presented in which I argue that the imprecise demands of Occupy Wall Street are a result not so much of the heterogeneous base of the movement but of the still largely unknown and “under-understood” nature of finance.Ce court article est consacré à deux problèmes liés au mouvement “Occupy Wall Street”. En premier lieu, nous présentons une géographie politique urbaine au niveau local dans laquelle le choix de la Plaza Liberty n’est pas accidentel mais bien délibéré, non seulement en raison de sa localisation entre les tours du capital global mais également parce que cette place représente un “espace public aux mains du privé”. Dans un second temps, nous proposons une géographie politique de la finance globale, où nous défendons l’idée que les revendications assez floues du mouvement “Occupy Wall Street” résultent non pas tant du caractère hétérogène de sa base mais plutôt de la nature même de la finance, encore largement inconnue et “sous-comprise”

Cuban Migrants and the Making of Havana\u27s Property Market

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the Global South . With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the transnational real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba\u27s cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into private restaurants or hotels. Central to our analysis is that the present development is not simply shaped by local or national demand and processes but also by international investment. We contend that a pattern of economic globalization unfolds where transnational remittances, rather than institutional investments or mortgage finance, steer Cuba\u27s emerging property market, along with local investments among Cuban citizens

Capital Market Union and residential capitalism in Europe: Rescaling the housing-centred model of financialization

This article examines the effects of implementing the proposals of the European Commission to institute a Capital Market Union (CMU) on the diverse landscape of residential capitalism in Europe. The CMU will bypass existing national institutional blockades that left core countries of the Eurozone, namely Germany, France and Italy, largely untouched by the housing-centred model of financialization that developed in countries like Spain, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. It is widely acknowledged that the rise in securitized mortgage debt contributed to the global financial crisis. As part of the CMU, the new European Commission is promoting mortgage securitization throughout the EU and thereby rescaling the political economy of housing finance that was hitherto rooted in national, institutional models. We argue that countries which ‘missed’ the previous housing boom will not be able to prevent future housing-centred financialization. CMU thus signifies a spatial expansion of the debt-led accumulation model

A Habitação no Centro da Economia Política

A economia política do pós-guerra não tem, de um modo geral, atribuído um papel importante ao tema da “habitação”. A habitação enquanto política tem sido um exclusivo da análise das políticas sociais e do domínio crescente dos estudos da habitação. A habitação enquanto mercado tem estado confinada à economia ortodoxa. Este artigo insiste no facto de a análise da economia política não poder permanecer relativamente indiferente à questão da habitação, já que esta está envolvida na economia política capitalista contemporânea através de uma série de aspectos críticos, interligados e muitas vezes contraditórios. O artigo conceptualiza esta implicação, identificando os múltiplos papéis da habitação quando o “capital” – a “matéria-prima” essencial da economia política – é considerado a partir da perspectiva de cada uma das suas formas primárias e mutuamente constitutivas: como processo de circulação, como relação social e como ideologia. Ao mobilizar estas três ópticas com vista a facultar uma perspectiva geral crítica da habitação-na-economia-política (mais do que uma economia política da habitação), reunimos e conjugamos os vários contributos fundamentais da pesquisa sobre a habitação para o nosso entendimento progressivo do capitalismo

What if we all work in between? Notes on the geography of geographical knowledge production and consumption

In the field of geography, “where you are” matters more than in most other fields. Yet, we are only beginning to write the geography of geographical knowledge production and consumption. The paper “Neither here nor there or always here and there?” (Wray et al., 2013) is an important building block in creating such a geography. It is important to realize that almost all of us are, in some way or another, in between. Since no geographical location is only normal or exotic, we should continue and intensify our efforts to decenter and deperipheralize our fieldstatus: publishe

Review of The City: London and the Global Power of Finance

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