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

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

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”

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

LIFE in a ZOO: Henri Lefebvre and the (social) production of (abstract) space in Liverpool

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically ‘performed’, this paper takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change—occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between ‘abstract space-makers’ and ‘social space-makers’—is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures

Do maps make geography? Part 2: Post-Katrina New Orleans, post-foreclosure Cleveland and neoliberal urbanism

A map indicating declining or shrinking neighborhoods may lead to the withholding of not only city services, but also mortgage loans. Maps used in these strategies have a performative function: they are either used to prescribe decline or they have the effect of furthering decline by marking neighborhoods as places “where houses have little or no value”, that are “dying”, “to be depopulated” or “distressed”. In addition to the two cases discussed in the first part of this paper, this second part discusses, first, the post-Katrina planning and rebuilding of New Orleans and how these processes are imagined in maps, and second, mortgage foreclosures and the mapping of “distressed” and “shrinking” places in the City of Cleveland. Planning for shrinkage often turns into a policy to keep real estate prices and city services up in some neighborhoods at the expense of others. The mapping of deserving and undeserving neighborhoods excludes and impoverishes those places deemed racially infiltrated, declining, and dying. At times, the federal government and cities around the U.S. want to get rid of what they see as declining neighborhoods, but what they really get rid of is affordable housing. It could be argued that this is a form of “neoliberal urbanism”, but these policies had a precursor in the 1930s and late 1960s and 1970s. The “old urban right” had already won several significant victories in the war of ideologies, hinting at a neoliberalism avant la lettre. Key words: Cleveland, Ohio; New Orleans, Louisiana; foreclosure crisis; social exclusion; neighborhood decline; shrinking cities; neoliberal urbanismstatus: publishe

What kind of theory for what kind of housing research?

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Do maps make geography? Part 3: Reconnecting the trace

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