CFP AAG 2025: THE ASSETIZATION OF URBAN LAND AND HOUSING
Detroit, 24-28 March 2025
https://www.aag.org/events/aag2025/
Organizers:
Jennie Gustafsson (Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University)
Defne Kadioglu (Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University)
Mika Hyötyläinen (University of Helsinki)
Assetization has become a salient concept for geographers to grasp the transformation of things -commodities and non-commodities- into recurrent income streams (Langley 2020; Birch & Ward 2022). Scholars have examined how, for instance, institutional investors have identified farmland, urban infrastructure, and commercial and residential real estate as rent-bearing, financial assets (Ouma 2020; Tapp & Weber 2022; McArthur 2024). Here, the processes of enclosure, rent extraction, indebtedness, and risk-taking have been identified as crucial to sustain value circulation and capital accumulation (Birch & Ward 2022; McArthur 2024). Assetization and the rentier economy (Christophers 2020) reproduce inequalities, and reinforce class, racial and gendered injustices, pushing scholars to critically engage with the emerging horizons of housing and urban equity (Adkins, Cooper & Konings 2020). How assets are being made and remade is however an ongoing and conflictual process (Birch & Ward 2022). The actors in this process are heterogenous, spanning from asset managers and institutional investors, such as private equity and pension funds, as well as state and public actors becoming more embedded in financialized practices and frameworks (Wainwright & Manwille 2020; Holm et al. 2023). There is, therefore, an urgent need to explore how assetization continuously transgresses into everyday life and the economic, political, spatial and social ramifications of this development.
The session explores how the assetization of urban land and housing evolve as social and spatial processes. We welcome particularly political economic and geographical approaches to assets and assetization, financialisation, urban governance, and fiscal policy. While the session links conceptual and empirical explorations of how assets are (re)made, we also ask how the asset form affects social reproduction, and(re)produces housing and urban injustices. Furthermore, we look for alternative visions in regard to resistance, housing and urban policy, and public finance. Hence, the session welcomes empirical, theoretical and conceptual contributions engaging with how housing, land and the urban are influenced by assetization, including works on its many contradictory social, spatial and economic processes.
The session invites papers on, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Institutional investors and the provision of different types of real estate
- Geographies of assetization, including the role of spaces and cities beyond larger cities
- Theoretical engagements with rent and value theory
- Assets, finance and the reproduction of inequalities and injustices
- Resistance and alternatives to assetization
- Green and social impact investment
- Carbon assets and energy finance
- The role of housing policy and local governments
- Financialized infrastructures
- The role of technoscientific capitalism
Please send an abstract (not more than 250 words) to Jennie Gustafsson jennie.gustafsson@mau.se by October 18. We will swiftly notify the authors, giving participants time to submit prior to the October 31 abstract deadline.
References
Adkins, L., Cooper, M., & Konings, M. (2020). The asset economy: property ownership and the new logic of inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Birch, K., & Ward, C. (2022). Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies.’ Dialogues in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221130807
Christophers, B. (2020). Rentier capitalism: who owns the economy, and who pays for it? London: Verso.
Holm, A., Alexandri, G., Bernt, M., Oxenaar, M., Aalbers, M. B., Kadioğlu, D., Coppola. Alessandro, Cordini, M. M., Belotti, E., Bortolotti, A., Watt, P., Hodkinson, S., & Audycka, B. (2023). Housing policy under the conditions of financialisation. https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-urbaine/sites/sciencespo.fr.ecole-urbaine/files/Rapporthousinghopofin.pdf
Langley, P. (2020). Assets and assetization in financialized capitalism. Review of International Political Economy, 28(2), 382–393. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1830828
McArthur, J. (2024). Infrastructure debt funds and the assetization of public infrastructures. Environment and Planning A, 56(3), 681–698. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231216319/ASSET/IMAGES/LARGE/10.1177_0308518X231216319-FIG2.JPEG
Ouma, S. (2020). Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.
Tapp, R., & Weber, R. (2022). Buildings as financial assets. In M. Hyötylainen & Robert A. Beauregard (Eds.), The Political Economy of Land: Rent, Financialization and Resistance. London: Routledge.
Wainwright, T., & Manville, G. (2017). Financialization and the third sector: Innovation in social housing bond markets. Environment and Planning A, 49(4), 819–838. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16684140
