Financial geography III: The financialization of the city

Abstract

This report discusses the financialization of urban governance and the built environment as an explicit state strategy, focusing on municipal finance and the use of financial products by the local state and (semi-)public sector. A number of lessons can be drawn regarding the temporality and spatiality of financializing ‘the urban’. Firstly, the financial crisis that started in 2007 has not resulted in a definancialization of the city. Secondly, despite a number of common trends, the literature also highlights the diversity of experiences. Yet it would be too easy to conclude that the financialization of the land, housing and real estate is exclusively a Global North phenomenon, as it extends into the Global South. Finally, the literature notes an emerging gentrification-touristification-financialization nexus. The role of the state in all of this is variegated and often ambiguous.

Standards and SSOs in the contested widening and deepening of financial markets: The arrival of Green Municipal Bonds in Mexico City

“…Critical geographers investigating the impacts of these processes on the ground thus frequently pinpoint that ‘investments are diverted to those that deliver financial results rather than those that benefit local communities’ (Aalbers, 2019b: 10). Yet, as Aalbers observes, the literature is divided in its evaluation of the agency of cities in these processes, with some authors stating that finance is ‘capturing urban governance’ (Aalbers, 2019a: 2; e.g. Hendrikse and Sidaway, 2014), and others pointing more towards the opportunities for cities to experiment with financial innovations (e.g.…”

‘Post-pandemic’ transnational gentrifications: A critical outlook

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global crisis unprecedented in peacetime, yet with important resemblance to the 2008 global financial crisis. Just as the repercussions of the last crisis altered real estate markets globally with significant long-term effects on housing and urban neighbourhoods in the North Atlantic hemisphere (Aalbers, 2020; Beswick et al, 2016), the pandemic’s impacts will now also significantly reshape the future of our cities. This will have immense consequences on how we perceive, appropriate and use space, challenging many assumptions about how urban life unfolds.…”

Urban redevelopment, governance and vulnerability: thirty years of ‘regeneration’ in Dublin

“…The state co-produces vulnerabilities often as an (un-)intended consequence of earlier rounds of intervention to mitigate weaknesses, as evident in the economic, property and legitimacy crises of the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. Despite the possibilities provided by the post-crash context to re-configure planners, planning and other actors in a new urban context and to move institutional fixations with urban development beyond bricks, mortar and circuits of global capital (Moore-Cherry, 2015), post-crisis urbanism has evolved from an earlier form of 'roll-with-it neoliberalism' within an environment where 'entrepreneurialism', growth and competition remain the dominant motifs (Brownill & Carpenter, 2009;Cox, 2010), where the urban land market, housing and infrastructure is increasingly financialized (O'Callaghan et al, 2015;Aalbers, 2020) and where urban inequalities persist. It may be that the politics of urgency, the need to be seen to do something in a single crisis or recurrent crises, mitigates against new thinking, and sustains the status quo.…”

“…The role of the state in urban redevelopment and regeneration has been a pre-occupation in urban studies for a significant length of time, shifting from an emphasis on examining consequences of the 'rolling back' of the state in the 1980s to the 'rolling-out' of new interventions in the early years of this millennium and the emergence of 'roll-with-it' neoliberalism (Keil, 2009), and more recently on the state role in austerity and financialised urbanism (Peck, Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, 872012; O'Brien et al, 2019;Aalbers, 2020). Although regeneration is positioned as a product of de-regulation and liberalization, the reality is that, in many if not all cases, it has required more not less state intervention (Ward, 2003), often-times repeatedly in the same geographical areas (Henderson, 2012;Moore-Cherry, 2015).…”