When: 27-28 November 2025
Where: Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
What: Workshop to prepare contributions to a Special Issue. Target journal: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (TBC). SI proposal to be submitted in Fall 2025, upon receiving all abstract proposals.
Organizers: Chiara Valli (Malmö University, IUR), Lorenzo Vidal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Ismael Yrigoy (University of the Balearic Islands).
From political economists to radical geographers, there is an emerging consensus that housing-centered rentierism is an engine for socio-economic inequalities, by accelerating forms of accumulation by dispossession and new forms of socio-political subjectification (Fields 2017), and thus making housing a crucial frontline of class conflict. Historical debates on ‘housing classes’ have been revamped, highlighting the need to understand and conceptualise the new centrality of housing in social stratifications and class formation in financialized capitalism (Ruonavaara 2024). Indeed, theorizations of housing property and social class have shifted from wage-based models to frameworks centered on asset ownership, intergenerational transfers, and cultural capital (Christophers, 2021a; McKee et al, 2020; Howard, 2025). Adkins et al. (2020) have spearheaded class-based approaches to housing, by arguing that class positionality is nowadays shaped not only by employment conditions but increasingly by the ownership of housing assets: a major social faultline in contemporary societies is between those who own housing assets who appreciate faster than income, and those who do not (Adkins et al 2020; 2021; Cleaver, 2000; Karakilic, 2022).
While sparking wide interest and engagement across the social sciences, the housing-asset class model has also been challenged, underscoring the need for further theoretical and empirical work to fully grasp social class formation in relation to housing ownership (Burrows 2025). For instance, the extent to which social stratifications at large are reshaped by housing rentierism, and the ways in which housing assetization intersects with labor relations and corporate rentierism in class stratification, are contested terrains (Christophers 2021b). In a similar fashion to previous employment-based class categorization, the static nature of the asset economy classification (admittedly a risk carried with any kind of classificatory attempt) seems also to ignore contradictory class locations (Wright 2005) and situations that blur the lines between renters and owners. Examples of such contradictory locations are the cases of shared ownership situations (Wallace 2012), practices of ‘rentvesting’ (Haddow 2019), the role of broader social and kinship networks to access asset ownership (Cook 2021), or low-income or insolvent property owners (Garcia-Lamarca 2022); or the precarious hosting-related work performed by low income short-term rentals’ owners (Semi & Tonetta, 2021), amongst others.
Moreover, the role of debt, central in Marxist accounts of class formation in contemporary capitalism (Lazzarato 2012, Federici 2018), is arguably overshadowed in the asset economy framework by the emphasis on the speculative logic of such debt. Urban and housing scholars have called for the need to incorporate the generalization of housing-related indebtedness into our theorizations of class and class-related urban processes (Kallin, 2021). Again, feminist scholars have brought attention to the gendered and racialized dimensions of debt, the commodification of social reproduction, and the need to further nuance economist perspectives on housing and class (Cavallero & Gago, 2021; Federici, 2018; Wolifson et al; 2023). Together with the exploration of contradictory housing-based class locations and unpacking the role of debt in class formation, Marxist scholarship has also revisited debates that develop class analysis in different directions. Understanding landowners as a “third class” beyond workers and capitalists, for example, has been put back on the table for discussion (Manning, 2022). Class-compositionist approaches have also proposed new concepts such as that of “spatial composition,” to account for the growing importance of urbanisation processes in the current conjuncture (Gray, 2022). The lived experiences structured around housing can also be seen to be central to shaping processes of class formation beyond specific locations in property structures (Thompson, 1993; 2013), as recent research has shown (Baeten et al, 2020; Leitner et al, 2022).
There is, therefore, an urgent need to grasp the role of housing-based rentierism in class formation in ways that problematize and nuance the asset owners/non-owners distinction, including contradictory relations to asset ownership and wage, but also gendered and racialized relations to property.
This workshop aims to collect contributions that explore the relationship between housing property and social class formation processes in contemporary urban contexts by focusing on underexplored and/or contradictory dimensions of housing property and class relations, such as indebted homeowners, low-income homeowners and landlords, pension fund landlords, or tenants who are set to inherit housing wealth in post-homeownership societies. The intersections of racialised and gendered dimensions in access to assets and debt are also of the utmost interest. The ambition is to collect a variety of empirical and conceptual contributions from different geographical perspectives, to provide theoretical contributions towards the theorization and understanding of housing-rooted class formation processes in the contemporary asset economy.
We are thus seeking contributions centered on the following topics:
- Conceptualizations of housing-based contradictory class locations.
- Role of debt/leverage in housing-based class formation and perception.
- Articulations between positions in housing property relations and processes of class subjectivation.
- Relational understandings of class beyond housing-based inequalities and stratifications.
- Intersectionality of gender and race in housing-based class formations.
- Class approaches to contentious housing politics and broader recomposition of class /cross-tenure alliances.
Timeline:
Please send abstract proposals of 300 to 500 words to Chiara Valli, Ismael Yrigoy, and Lorenzo Vidal at chiara.valli@mau.se, Lorenzo.VidalFolch@uab.cat , and ismael.yrigoy@usc.es by 14 September 2025.
Abstract acceptance will be communicated shortly after.
15 November 2025: Deadline for submission of paper drafts.
27-28 November: Workshop at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
We have the possibility to cover some travel expenses for workshop participants. Please let us know as soon as possible if you need it. Precedence will be given to early-career scholars and scholars without institutional funding.
References:
Adkins, L., Cooper, M., & Konings, M. (2020). The asset economy. John Wiley & Sons.
Baeten, G., Listerborn, C., Persdotter, M., & Pull, E. (Eds.). (2020). Housing displacement: conceptual and methodological issues. Routledge.
Burrows, R. (2025). Asset classes? Some reflections on the ‘new class realities’ of rentier capitalism. Thesis Eleven.
Christophers, B. (2021a). A tale of two inequalities: Housing-wealth inequality and tenure inequality. Environment and planning A: economy and space, 53(3), 573-594.
Christophers, B. (2021b). Class, assets and work in rentier capitalism. Historical materialism, 29(2), 3-28.
Cleaver H (2000) Reading Capital Politically. Texas: University of Texas Press.
Cook, J. (2021). Keeping it in the family: Understanding the negotiation of intergenerational transfers for entry into homeownership. Housing Studies, 36(8), 1193-1211.
Federici, S. (2018). Women, money and debt: Notes for a feminist reappropriation movement. Australian Feminist Studies, 33(96), 178-186.
Fields, D. (2017). Unwilling subjects of financialization. International journal of urban and regional research, 41(4), 588-603.
Cavallero, L., & Gago, V. (2021). A feminist reading of debt. London: Pluto Press.
García-Lamarca, M. (2022). Non-performing loans, non-performing people: Life and struggle with mortgage debt in Spain (Vol. 53). University of Georgia Press.
Gray N (2022) Rethinking Italian Autonomist Marxism: Spatial Composition, Urban Contestation, and the Material Geographies of Social Reproduction. Antipode, 54(3), 800–824.
Haddow, N. (2019). Smashed Avocado: How I cracked the property market and you can too. Black Inc..
Howard, A. (2025). Seven propositions about ‘generation rent’. Housing, Theory and Society, 42(1), 1-22.
Kallin, H. (2021). In debt to the rent gap: Gentrification generalized and the frontier of the future. Journal of Urban Affairs, 43(10), 1393-1404.
Karakilic, E. (2022). Rentierism and the commons: A critical contribution to Brett Christophers’ Rentier Capitalism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54(2), 422-429.
Lazzarato, M. (2012). The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition.
Leitner, H; Sheppard, E; Colven, E (2022). Market-Induced Displacement and Its Afterlives: Lived Experiences of Loss and Resilience. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112, 753-762.
Manning FTC (2022) A Defence of the Concept of the Landowning Class as the Third Class: Towards a Logic of Landownership. Historical Materialism, 30(3), 79–115.
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Ruonavaara, H. (2024). An idea that refuses to die. Rise, fall and resurgence of “housing class”. Housing Studies, 1-21.
Semi, G., & Tonetta, M. (2021). Marginal hosts: Short-term rental suppliers in Turin, Italy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53(7), 1630-1651.
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Thompson EP (2013) The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin Books.
Wallace, A. (2012). Shared ownership: satisfying ambitions for homeownership?. International Journal of Housing Policy, 12(2), 205-226.
Wolifson, P., Maalsen, S., & Rogers, D. (2023). Intersectionalizing housing discrimination under rentier capitalism in an asset-based society. Housing, Theory and Society, 40(3), 335-355.
Wright, E. O. (Ed.). (2005). Approaches to class analysis. Cambridge University Press.
