Speaker: Maja Stalevska (PhD, Uppsala University)
In person at Niagara C0826 and on Zoom (link). Maja will join us on Zoom.
This seminar will be based on Maja’s doctoral dissertation.
Bio:
I am a human geographer, currently based at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) in Uppsala. I received my PhD from Uppsala University in 2025 with the dissertation Building Capital – The Political Economy of Commercial Real Estate Development in Stockholm, which examines the evolving relationship between capital accumulation and the built environment.
My research lies at the intersection of urban geography and political economy, focusing on urban development, land, and real estate finance. I am currently involved in a Formas-funded research project that explores the financial and land dynamics of housing production in Sweden and England, both historically and from a contemporary perspective (link). In fall 2026, I will start a new project titled Critical Digital Infrastructures (funded by the Lars Erik Lundbergs Stipendiestiftelse), focusing on the political economy of data centre development in Sweden.
Abstract:
This seminar is based on my doctoral dissertation, Building Capital – The Political Economy of Commercial Real Estate Development in Stockholm, which explores how value is produced, negotiated, and captured in urban development processes, paying attention to the intersecting roles of developers, investors, and planning systems. It does this by tracing the historical and contemporary evolution of land and real estate finance systems in Stockholm, situated within broader political-economic transformations of the Swedish welfare state. The study pays particular attention to how the state actively shapes, enables, and mediates these processes through planning, regulation, and the management of publicly-owned land, highlighting how tensions in public land governance have intensified as urban development has become increasingly financialized.
I argue that these contradictions are central to contemporary capital accumulation in the built environment. They operate indirectly, through the growing entanglement of state institutions with financial markets, and directly through the reorientation of urban governance towards treating municipal land as a financial asset. Taken together, these dynamics reveal how municipal land management has become a key site through which the tensions between welfare-oriented planning and financialized urban development are actively produced and sustained.
This seminar is part of the IUR Brown Bag Seminar Series. Bring your lunch! If you have any questions, please contact Defne Kadioglu and Julie Goodrich.