Financialisation of housing
The financialisation of housing is the process by which a home stops being primarily a place to live and becomes a financial asset: bought, securitised and traded like any other investment product. Funds, insurers and listed companies replace the individual landlord and set prices by expected yield.
Raquel Rolnik, former UN rapporteur on housing, described the shift in Urban Warfare (2019, first published in Portuguese in 2015): mortgages turned millions of families into debtors and their homes into collateral for financial products that blew up in 2008. Afterwards, the same funds bought at a discount what the crisis had emptied.
Videos on this term (21)
- Urban AI
Michael Batty: How Models Reveal the Hidden Essence of Cities
Michael Batty explains the city as a complex system emerging from millions of decisions: fractals, scaling laws,…
Michael Batty 3 min read - Housing
What a Housing Bubble Is and Why It Is a Problem for the City
A housing bubble appears when price detaches from rents and wages and is sustained by credit and resale…
3 min read - Urban AI
Algorithms That Decide Your Rent in Spain and the United States
Revenue management programs pool landlords' data and recommend rents that rise all at once: how they work, the…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The City Written by Speculative Funds: Why Planning Lost the Pen
How investment funds, not planners, order the city: Madrid's price surge, public housing sold to funds and Harvey's…
3 min read - Urban AI
Manuel Castells: from neighbourhood struggle to network city
Castells read urban movements as structural responses to power, then showed how information networks reconfigured…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
Ash Amin 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local
Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999), edited by Çağlar Keyder, explains how Istanbul turned its…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
City Politics by Judd and Swanstrom: Power and Urban Governance
City Politics by Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom explains how US cities are governed: private power, growth…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall read Johannesburg as a modern African metropolis rather than an exception. The…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Urban Condition: The Fragmented Metropolis of Globalisation
The Urban Condition (1999) by the Ghent Urban Studies Team describes the dispersed metropolis of globalisation and…
3 min read - Urban economy
Urban Fortunes by Logan and Molotch: The City as a Growth Machine
Urban Fortunes (1987) by John Logan and Harvey Molotch explains who rules cities: the coalition that gains from…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global
New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban economy
Poverty Capital by Ananya Roy: The Critique of Microfinance
Poverty Capital (2010) by Ananya Roy shows how microfinance turned poverty into a market. From Grameen to…
Ananya Roy 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces: Globalisation and Urban Governance
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces explains how globalisation reorganised states in space: from spatial Keynesianism…
Neil Brenner 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urban Governance: Models, Challenges and Citizen Participation
Urban governance shares power over the city among governments, businesses and residents. Jon Pierre's four models,…
3 min read - Housing
Urban Warfare by Raquel Rolnik: Housing Under Financial Capital
Urban Warfare by Raquel Rolnik explains how housing went from a right to a financial asset and produced evictions…
Raquel Rolnik 2 min read - Housing
Real Estate Speculation and Housing Bubbles: Aalbers, Harvey, Martin
Real estate speculation turns housing into a financial asset and fuels bubbles. What Manuel Aalbers, David Harvey…
2 min read - Housing
Raquel Rolnik: The Right to Housing Against Financialization
Raquel Rolnik, UN Rapporteur on housing from 2008 to 2014, explains in Urban Warfare how housing went from a right…
Raquel Rolnik 3 min read - Urban AI
The Right to the Smart City: Who Benefits from Digital Cities?
The Right to the Smart City, edited by Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, carries Lefebvre's right to the city…
3 min read - Urban economy
How Capitalism Shapes Cities: David M. Gordon and Harvey
How capitalism shapes cities according to urban political economy: David M. Gordon's three phases, Harvey's…
2 min read - Urban form
Postmodern Urban Planning: Assemblage, Participation and Critique
What postmodern urban planning is: Sandercock and insurgent planning, Healey, the assemblage theory of Farías and…
2 min read
