The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been... more
The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected, and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually-constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation, and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political
economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism.
Keywords: housing, political economy, capital, circulation, ideology, social relations
In this introduction to a Virtual Special Issue on land rent, we sketch out the history of land rent theory, encompassing: classical political economy, Marx's political economy, the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban... more
In this introduction to a Virtual Special Issue on land rent, we sketch out the history of land rent theory, encompassing: classical political economy, Marx's political economy, the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban economics, and the Marxist consensus around rent theory during geography's spatial turn. We then overview some of the contemporary strands of literature that have developed since the breakdown of this consensus, namely political economy approaches centred on capital-switching, institutionalism of various stripes, and the rent gap theory. We offer a critical urban political economy perspective and a particular set of arguments run through the review: first, land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which require a separate theorisation. Second, since the 1970s consensus around land rent and the city dissipated, the critical literature has tended to take the question of why/how the payment exists at all for granted and so has ignored the particular dynamics of rent arising from the idiosyncrasies of land. Amongst the talk of an 'Anthropocene' and 'planetary urbanisation' it is surprising that the economic fulcrum of the capitalist remaking of geography has fallen so completely off the agenda. It is time to bring rent back into the analysis of land, cities and capitalism.
The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under-researched topic in the fields of Labour and Urban Geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour... more
The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under-researched topic in the fields of Labour and Urban Geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio-spatial manifestations of capital’s efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of ‘gentrification-supporting’ and ‘gentrification-fostered’ labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post-industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.
There is a long history in social science that connects urbanization to capitalism. This entry discusses how the work of Manuel Castells and in particular David Harvey informs our understanding of the urbanization of financial crises in... more
There is a long history in social science that connects urbanization to capitalism. This entry discusses how the work of Manuel Castells and in particular David Harvey informs our understanding of the urbanization of financial crises in the United States and elsewhere. The concepts of capital switching and financialization are central to the argument presented here. The entry also includes a discussion of the management of the crisis, focusing on both the failed institutional response to the financial crisis and the global/local grassroots response to the financial crisis.
This paper scrutinises the effects that the financialisation of land has on the land use planning process. Although finance is increasingly penetrating not only real estate but also land planning and development, there are few in-depth... more
This paper scrutinises the effects that the financialisation of land has on the land use planning process. Although finance is increasingly penetrating not only real estate but also land planning and development, there are few in-depth case studies describing and analysing this process. Contemporary urban development is characterised by the clustering of investments, the relocation of projects into peripheral areas, and an instrumental approach to planning. These trends are expressions of a change in the development process, characterised by the increased detachment between land use planning processes at the local level and financial investor logics located at other scales. We call this the decontextualisation of land capital. An in-depth analysis of the internal economic mechanics of an urban project in the Milan area is provided to illustrate these trends. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges that the conditions of financialised land capital pose to local and national governments. Keywords: financialization, urban redevelopment, real estate, land use planning, brownfield
David Harvey argued there to be an animating tension at the heart of the geographical dynamics of capital: a simultaneous need for both spatial fixity and perpetual motion. I adapt this frame for an era of financial globalization, arguing... more
David Harvey argued there to be an animating tension at the heart of the geographical dynamics of capital: a simultaneous need for both spatial fixity and perpetual motion. I adapt this frame for an era of financial globalization, arguing that fixity has been overcome through a 'quaternary circuit' of credit-mediated capital switching which undermines the distinct roles of the three circuits Harvey identified. However, rather than resolving the fixity/motion contradiction this has instead given it intensified form as capital liquidity versus spatial fixity. I explore this through the Port of Liverpool's innovative 'Whole Business Securitization', tracing out the logic of leverage underpinning financial capital switching and how such practices transform the spatio-temporality of circulation while fostering the conditions for greater crises. By theorizing financial globalization from a capital switching perspective, this article combines Minskian and relational approaches to understanding investment chains in a way that reprises geographical political economy's critique of the territoriality of capitalist crisis.
The paper offers a fresh empirically-grounded look on the spatialities of crisis-triggered employment forms, a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between... more
The paper offers a fresh empirically-grounded look on the spatialities of crisis-triggered employment forms, a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between investment flows from manufacturing to the built environment (capital switching) and underemployment in urban metropolitan regions, substantiating its impact on emerging spatial fixities. Departing from a theoretically-informed by political economy empirical analysis, the paper inquires changing fixed capital formations in Greece for an extended period prior-to and amid recession (1995-2012). It subsequently traces the evolution of waged part-time work in the capital metropolitan region of Attica (Athens) vis-à-vis the rest regional labour markets, focusing on the polarized 2005-12 period and the demise of construction investments. The paper highlights that a 'disrupted' capital switch occurred in Greece, closely associated with recalibrated sectoral priorities and institutional interventions, resulting in uneven sprawling of underemployment. Such 2 findings offer insight on how the dismantling of spatial fixes within core metropolitan regions of the EU South (and beyond) are connected to labour surplus and successive dumps in manufacturing and construction. The paper closes calling for new theorizations of contemporary urban regional unevenness and its spatio-temporal fixities, which account for the role of alterations in labour turnover time.
This short article is a reply to four commentaries that were written in response to our paper [Aalbers, M.B. and Christophers, B. (2014) Centering housing in political economy. Housing, Theory and Society 31: in press.]. Rather than... more
This short article is a reply to four commentaries that were written in response to our paper [Aalbers, M.B. and Christophers, B. (2014) Centering housing in political economy. Housing, Theory and Society 31: in press.]. Rather than discussing each of the commentaries, and each of the comments therein, separately, we have therefore chosen to distil and discuss four themes that appear important both to the commentators and to us: theory and abstraction; land rent; mortgage securitization; and the role of the state. Our discussion of theory advances the claim that theories and frameworks that take not only the economics of housing but also its politics, history, geography and institutions seriously can in principle be commensurate under the critical realist ontology suggested by two of our commentators. Our discussion of securitization adds to the existing literature on the theorization of the spatial fix and the circuits of capital. Finally, in reconsidering the housing question in political economy, we have sought to argue that you cannot today come to grips with the laws of the latter without factoring in the centrality of the former.
This paper scrutinises the effects that the financialisation of land has on the land use planning process. Although finance is increasingly penetrating not only real estate but also land planning and development, there are few in-depth... more
This paper scrutinises the effects that the financialisation of land has on the land use planning process. Although finance is increasingly penetrating not only real estate but also land planning and development, there are few in-depth case studies describing and analysing this process. Contemporary urban development is characterised by the clustering of investments, the relocation of projects into peripheral areas, and an instrumental approach to planning. These trends are expressions of a change in the development process, characterised by the increased detachment between land use planning processes at the local level and financial investor logics located at other scales. We call this the decontextualisation of land capital. An in-depth analysis of the internal economic mechanics of an urban project in the Milan area is provided to illustrate these trends. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges that the conditions of financialised land capital pose to local and national governments. Keywords: financialization, urban redevelopment, real estate, land use planning, brownfield
The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under-researched topic in the fields of Labour and Urban Geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour... more
The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under-researched topic in the fields of Labour and Urban Geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio-spatial manifestations of capital’s efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of ‘gentrification-supporting’ and ‘gentrification-fostered’ labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post-industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.
