Abstract:The 2008 financial crisis and its impacts on the urban landscape contributed to a proliferation of research on the financialization of urban space, particularly of housing. Today, financialization is a mainstream focus of study within geography. But while scholars have responded to earlier calls to center space and place in their research, it has only been quite recently that geographers have taken up efforts to politicize and contest the financialization of urban space. This essay assesses the emerging body o… Show more
“…These Wurundjeri lands are ‘under heavy and mounting pressure from rapid urban and housing development’ to service both domestic and foreign real estate buyers (Porter & Barry, , p.10). ‘As real estate has become more amenable to capital flows, capital flows have also been rescaled’, Fields argues (, p.4), before suggesting not only that ‘real estate is easily transformed into a liquid and tradable commodity, [but that] capital can also shift “in and out of different types of market in different corners of the globe”’ ( ibid , citing Schoenberger , p.431). As such scholarship shows, both the commodification and financialization of housing have clear spatio‐temporal dimensions that exceed the nation state (Aalbers, , , ; Fields, , ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The financialization of housing is a related concept (Aalbers, ; Aalbers, ; Fields, , ). In the broadest sense, the phrase refers to the increasing presence of a range of actors and organisations creating or using real estate management, mortgage, and financial instruments to profit‐seek.…”
The latest manifestation of Asian‐led foreign real estate investment in some global cities is contributing to housing becoming a liquid, global asset. Drawing on empirical data about Sydneysiders’ reported levels of real estate market activity, housing stress, and views about foreign real estate investment, we found that those who are financially invested in Sydney's local real estate market are generally more supportive of the presence of foreign investors and investment than are those not invested in that market. We also found that there were no significant comparative differences in beliefs about foreign investment between those who are in housing stress and those who are not. On the strength of those findings, we ask whether a degree of commonality is developing around a set of ideological reference points related to the commodification of housing. As housing in global cities is increasingly commodified and financialized, these ideological reference points could be boosting its commodification across boundaries of cultural difference and political jurisdiction. We conclude by suggesting the need for a new line of inquiry through which scholars could investigate the politics of globalised hyper‐commodified housing in order to expose the ideological reference points that serve to bolster the commodification of housing.
“…These Wurundjeri lands are ‘under heavy and mounting pressure from rapid urban and housing development’ to service both domestic and foreign real estate buyers (Porter & Barry, , p.10). ‘As real estate has become more amenable to capital flows, capital flows have also been rescaled’, Fields argues (, p.4), before suggesting not only that ‘real estate is easily transformed into a liquid and tradable commodity, [but that] capital can also shift “in and out of different types of market in different corners of the globe”’ ( ibid , citing Schoenberger , p.431). As such scholarship shows, both the commodification and financialization of housing have clear spatio‐temporal dimensions that exceed the nation state (Aalbers, , , ; Fields, , ).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The financialization of housing is a related concept (Aalbers, ; Aalbers, ; Fields, , ). In the broadest sense, the phrase refers to the increasing presence of a range of actors and organisations creating or using real estate management, mortgage, and financial instruments to profit‐seek.…”
The latest manifestation of Asian‐led foreign real estate investment in some global cities is contributing to housing becoming a liquid, global asset. Drawing on empirical data about Sydneysiders’ reported levels of real estate market activity, housing stress, and views about foreign real estate investment, we found that those who are financially invested in Sydney's local real estate market are generally more supportive of the presence of foreign investors and investment than are those not invested in that market. We also found that there were no significant comparative differences in beliefs about foreign investment between those who are in housing stress and those who are not. On the strength of those findings, we ask whether a degree of commonality is developing around a set of ideological reference points related to the commodification of housing. As housing in global cities is increasingly commodified and financialized, these ideological reference points could be boosting its commodification across boundaries of cultural difference and political jurisdiction. We conclude by suggesting the need for a new line of inquiry through which scholars could investigate the politics of globalised hyper‐commodified housing in order to expose the ideological reference points that serve to bolster the commodification of housing.
“…In the wider spatial sciences, there is a long tradition of linking spatial scales, often hierarchically articulated (Brenner 2009), to the multiscalar organization of urban space and processes of social reproduction under capitalism (Harvey 1989). This trend is also visible in the burgeoning literature on financialization, in which many scholars focus on the urban scale, but also examine how the process of financialization “concerns and traverses geographical […] scales” (Fields 2017, 2). Our systematic literature review revealed that many authors also differentiate residential property investors according to their spatial scales of operation .…”
“…Scholars argue that the ways in which owner-occupiers approach purchasing a house have shifted from creating a place to live in to being an investment opportunity, turning property-holding citizens “into asset-accumulating investors” (Smith 2008, 520). In many studies, the lived experience of financialization is highlighted (Fields 2017), with individuals exhibiting calculated risks and entrepreneurial logics with regards to home ownership. Gillon and Gibson (2018) focus on the emotional performances and sociomaterial expressions of “investor-occupier subjects,” and Watson (2010, 1466) embeds the “modern investor subject” into a wider shift toward an asset-based welfare system in the UK.…”
This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors. A recurring critique in recent years has been the minimal acknowledgment of investor heterogeneity particularly in relation to urban development and the financialization of housing. Yet, to date, there is no systematic evidence supporting these contentions. Therefore, we conducted an exhaustive literature review of residential investment landscapes through the Web of Science citation database in the following fields: Urban and regional planning, geography, sociology, urban studies, public administration, and economics. Subsequently, we methodically searched for the types of investors addressed, and investor categories employed, in journal articles published between 2000 and 2019. Following a meta-categorization of the results, we demonstrate how existing literature differentiates investors in terms of their spatial scale of operation, size and social composition, investment object and finance, or investment and social behavior. Additionally, we highlight the key topics and issues addressed in the reviewed literature within each meta-category. We propose to turn the four meta-categories into a multidimensional analytical framework as a point of departure for a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of investor differentiations, a tool that is urgently needed in Planning Studies and related disciplines. Furthermore, we argue that mixed method approaches combining hard and quantifiable with soft behavioral investor characteristics, as well as institutional analyses combining structural considerations with actors’ agency, are indispensable to disentangle contemporary residential property market dynamics.
“…The commodification of housing in London and other major cities in the Global North and South has, as many have recently argued, become a defining feature of an intensifying housing crisis (see Aalbers, 2015;Fernandez and Aalbers, 2016;Harvey, 2012;Rolnik, 2013;Minton, 2017). A growing body of scholarship has, in this context, stressed the importance of conceptualising housing as "a socially embedded feature of financial capitalism" (Soederberg, 2018: 114; see also Aalbers, 2011, Fields andUffer, 2014;Fields, 2017;Garcia Lamarca and Kaika, 2016). Particular attention has been paid to the relationship between financialisation and housing insecurity with a focus on the reconfiguration of housing markets in the wake of the global financial crisis and the re-emergence of older practices of expropriation and exploitation in new emboldened forms (Akers and Seymour, 2018: 127; see Desmond, 2016;Roy, 2017, Sassen, 2014.…”
Section: Vacancy Austerity and Disposabilitymentioning
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