Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Jaime Jover, The Graduate Center, CUNY

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Description:

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, research on (housing) financialization has grown extensively. This work has been critical to understanding the 2008 financial crisis and the burst of the real estate bubble (Aalbers, 2009; Gotham, 2009; Newman, 2009), the global expansion of housing investment through private equity firms, REITs, hedge funds, etc. (Beswick et. al., 2016; Janoschka et. al., 2020), the increasing urban inequalities because of their corporate strategies (Rolnik, 2013; Aalbers, 2019), and efforts to contest housing financialization (Fields, 2015; Teresa, 2016; García-Lamarca, 2017). The proliferation of financialization research in geography and other disciplines has stirred debate and highlighted the contested character of the concept of financialization (Aalbers, 2015; Christophers, 2015). This has occurred while others have called on scholars to focus on the work of contesting urban financialization (Fields, 2017) and “de-financializing housing” (Wijburg, 2020).

The aim of this session is to continue, expand, and extend conversations focused on the relationship between housing activism and scholarly work on housing financialization. We do so with the understanding that the concept of financialization has not become a ‘boundary object’ (Ouma, 2015, p. 227) for activists and scholars. We were reminded of this during a workshop titled “Housing Financialization and the Need For a Global Renters Movement,” hosted by the Gittell Collective, that brought together housing activists and scholars. Activists from urban social movements in different contexts agreed financialization (with some exceptions) was not part of their vocabulary and therefore, not conceptually, part of people’s daily struggles. Nonetheless, the financialization of urban housing under racial capitalism is very real and translates into the worsening of living conditions for low-income populations across cities - especially Black, Brown, and Hispanic communities, and particularly women - while also generating forms of resistance to it (Fields and Raymond, 2021). There is a great need for research and scholarship that “demystifies” housing financialization (Christophers, 2015, p. 232) and “collaps[es] the distance” that insulates financial actors from the everyday consequences of their action (Fields, 2017, p. 8), especially work that emerges from and supports the work of activists and urban social movements. Yet, as scholars and activists, we are well aware that navigating this relationship can be fraught with challenges while also holding great opportunity; we see this as a productive tension that needs to be situated in “on-the-ground” struggle.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda