Metropolitics

Unleashing Finance Capitalism in the City: An Interview with Isaac Rose, Author of The Rentier City

Jonathan Silver & Isaac Rose — 2025-06-24T05:00:00Z

Jonathan Silver interviews author and tenant organizer Isaac Rose about his book on housing financialization in Manchester, The Rentier City. They discuss the motivations for writing the book, how theory informs practice, and the influences that guided Rose as he wrote.
Isaac Rose, a tenant-union organizer in Manchester, recently launched a new book with Repeater, The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis. In it, Rose unravels the causes of today's intensifying

- Interviews / housing, financialization, tenants, Manchester, United Kingdom, community organizing, gentrification, England, housing justice

Settling on the Financial Periphery: Alternative Housing Practices in Hegang, China

Yimeng Yang — 2025-06-17T05:00:00Z

Can valuing a home for its use value constitute a form of resistance to housing financialization? Considering the case of housing in Hegang, China, Yimeng Yang argues that the grassroots rejection of the logic of financialization is a form of resistance.
Hegang, a city in Northeast China known for its coal industry, rose to prominence during China's socialist era. It has faced economic stagnation, a population exodus, and plummeting housing prices over the past decade. This decline followed

- Essays / China, Hegang, Asia, financialization, real estate, housing, housing markets

Digital Technology and the City: New Forms of Urban Segregation in Cape Town?

Julien Migozzi & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-06-23T05:00:00Z

In the age of platform capitalism, how is digital technology reconfiguring real-estate markets and access to housing? In Cape Town, South Africa, credit scoring—a form of selection based on financial behavior—has become the norm in this regard, contributing to the reappearance of apartheid-era segregation.
“We don't take tenants under 622”: the response from Ganief, a real-estate agent in Cape Town, is swift. In order to obtain a lease in International Housing Solutions' housing portfolio, a

- From the Field / real estate, apartheid, digital city, inequalities, tech sector, Cape Town, financialization, tech economy, technology, Africa, South Africa

A Global Right-to-Housing Movement Versus Financialization

Jaime Jover — 2021-06-23T15:38:01Z

Financialization enables a wealthy transnational class to accumulate capital through land, enhances inequalities through housing, and denies and deprives human rights. Housing activists must articulate an internationalist response to this global conflict, setting aside political and cultural differences and looking beyond the local scale of every housing conflict.
In February 2021, the Gittell Collective at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) hosted a workshop on

- Essays / affordable housing, housing, real estate, right to housing, housing crisis, housing justice, financialization

Cities in the Age of Financialization

2021-06-18T05:00:00Z

Over the past four decades, the financialization of capitalism has transformed economies, societies, and urban space. This series of articles examines the growing involvement of financial actors, instruments, and rationales in the production of the urban built environment; the role of public authorities in this process; and their social, political, and spatial consequences.
---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles in this series ▼ Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the financial

- Series / finance, housing, financialization, real estate, urban project, urban development, development, urban planning

The Financialization of Rent-Regulated Housing in New York City after Rent Reform

Benjamin F. Teresa — 2020-12-04T06:00:00Z

In New York City, rent-controlled housing stock has been progressively deregulated over the last three decades, to the point where it is now wholly in the hands of financial investors. In this paper, Benjamin Teresa analyzes how tenants' associations have been fighting back against these landlords, who have let housing fall into disrepair while simultaneously hiking rents.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization In June of 2019, the New York State legislature stunned the

- From the Field / housing, right to housing, financialization, rent control, rent, tenants, New York, United States, activism, urban knowledge, public policy, housing policy

The Brazilian Experience of Financialization Through Urban Redevelopment: The Case of “Urban Operations”

Laisa Eleonora Marostica Stroher — 2020-12-01T06:00:00Z

Laisa Stroher examines the history of large-scale urban regeneration projects in Brazil and shows how a policy instrument initially designed to respond to a lack of public funding has morphed into a tool that has helped transform urban land into a financial asset, leading ultimately to the displacement of populations without delivering on the initial social promises.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization Large-scale urban development projects and their contradictions feature

- From the Field / financialization, urban regeneration, urban development, Urban Operations (Brazil), Brazil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, redevelopment, urban planning, real estate, Latin America, South America, displacement

Fragile Financialization: The Struggle for Power and Control in Indian Real-Estate Investment

Llerena Guiu Searle — 2020-11-27T06:00:00Z

How does the financialization of real estate—a global phenomenon—affect urban development in India? In this ethnographic essay, Llerena Guiu Searle shows how financialization redefines the balance of power between the real-estate sector, local authorities, and financial investors.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization Advertisements for a residential township 40 km (25 miles) outside of Chennai, India, called Hiranandani Parks Oragadam–Chennai, show cream-colored colonnaded

- From the Field / financialization, real estate, India, urban development

Sale of the Century: Chicago's Infrastructure Deals and the Privatization State

Philip Ashton & Marc Doussard & Rachel Weber — 2020-11-24T06:00:00Z

Since 2004, the City of Chicago has been engaged in a new wave of infrastructure privatizations, selling concessions to financial institutions. Philip Ashton, Marc Doussard and Rachel Weber analyze the consequences of these transfers in detail, in terms of both public action and the impact on users, and identify lessons to be learned from this new way of doing things, whereby firms mine the city for potential revenue streams.
---- Series: Cities in the Age of Financialization When the City

- From the Field / financialization, privatization, infrastructure, infrastructures, urban services, Chicago, United States

Nature's Worth: Using Human Markets to Value Ecosystems' Contributions

Anna Krol & Lisa Jean Moore — 2018-02-20T06:00:00Z

Mattijs van Maasakkers' The Creation of Markets for Ecosystem Services in the United States: The Challenge of Trading Places pulls readers into the complex relationship between environment and economy. In this multi-sited ethnography, Van Maasakkers hones in on three large-scale US conservation and restoration projects, exposing gaps in market-based approaches and the ultimate failure of the financialization of nature.
How is the value of an ecological site measured? By the numbers? The 1.35

- Reviews / environment, nature, ethnography, ecosystems, financialization, markets, ecosystem services