Gertjan Wijburg | Utrecht University (original) (raw)

Papers by Gertjan Wijburg

Research paper thumbnail of Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba

Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba, 2024

In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms o... more In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms of tourism-led housing commodification in Havana, Cuba. In 2011, the Cuban property market reopened to investment when the socialist government allowed the sale of private property at prices set in a market environment. We pay attention to the critical role of Cuban migrants, remittance investors and lifestyle elites in commodifying Havana's historic housing stock and transforming residential property into short-term rentals, hotels, private restaurants and tourist boutiques. We demonstrate how the Cuban government has become an active market facilitator, either by restraining private competition or by encapsulating tourism property investment within broader channels of the state. We conclude that the case of Havana is indicative of broader trends in tourism and hospitality, particularly in the Global South and East. We propose tourism-led housing commodification as a conceptual framework for understanding these broader commonalities.

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Research paper thumbnail of Tourism-led Rentier Capitalism: Extracting Rent and Value from Tourism Property

antipode

A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property aro... more A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the rise of 'tourism-led rentier capitalism'which is a particular fraction of capitaland its variegated dimensions. Although tourism property investors do not operate as a monolithic bloc or a socioeconomic class, they share similar interests and collectively reshape tourism destinations by extracting tourism rent, a form of monopoly and differential rent, which can be derived from natural and public goods or sign values and imaginations of places that imbue meaning and value into locational attributes. As such, they contribute to unevenly developed and variegated geographies of property investment which are nonetheless driven by common, underlying mechanisms and spatial practices. The conversion of tourism destinations into financialized accumulation frontiers is one broader outcome of tourismled rentier capitalism. The extraction of tourism rent is another.
Keywords: urban tourism; touristification; gentrification; financialization; Airbnb; short-term rentals; land rent.

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Research paper thumbnail of Commodifying Havana? Private accumulation, assetisation and marketisation in the Cuban metropolis

Urban Studies

In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressu... more In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesised that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving ‘South’. However, even though transnational capital is finding its way into Southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven. In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalised free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process. Even so, non-debt bearing assetisation pressures are clearly redefining...

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Research paper thumbnail of CFP - Social Movements against Housing Financialization for Critical Housing Analysis

Critical Housing Analysis, 2023

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Research paper thumbnail of Commodifying Havana? Private accumulation, assetisation and marketisation in the Cuban metropolis

Urban Studies, 2023

In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressu... more In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesized that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving 'South.' However, even though transnational capital is finding its ways into southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven. In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalized free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process. Even so, non-debt bearing assetization pressures are clearly redefining Havana's socialist property market. While the State encourages foreign direct investment into state-owned hotels and joint ventures, transnational remittances contribute to the commodification of Havana's private housing stock.

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Research paper thumbnail of Cuban Migrants and the Making of Havana\u27s Property Market

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally cir... more The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the Global South . With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the transnational real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba\u27s cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into privat...

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Research paper thumbnail of Cuban migrants and the making of Havana’s property market

Urban Geography, 2020

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Research paper thumbnail of The internationalization of commercial real estate markets in France and Germany

Competition & Change, 2017

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Research paper thumbnail of The Financialisation of Rental Housing 2.0: Releasing Housing into the Privatised Mainstream of Capital Accumulation

Antipode, 2018

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Research paper thumbnail of The alternative financialization of the German housing market

Housing Studies, 2017

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Research paper thumbnail of Tax-incentivized housing production and the affordability crisis: International lessons from the low-income housing tax credit program in the United States

Housing Studies, 2022

Historically, many Western nations have subsidized public and affordable housing with public gran... more Historically, many Western nations have subsidized public and affordable housing with public grants and government-backed loans. However, in response to declining housing affordability and high land and development costs, various national governments are now introducing tax-based housing incentives to promote affordable housing production by private actors. Understanding the broader implications of this shift to tax subsidy and private investment, this review reflects on the market outcomes of arguably the most documented tax-based housing program in the Western world: the low-income housing tax credit program (LIHTC) in the United States. Although LIHTC remains a unique and distinctive instrument, some valuable lessons can be learned from it. In comparative terms, the program offers stricter affordability requirements than its counterparts introduced in countries like Australia, Chile, Colombia, France and Germany. Furthermore, it is accompanied by stronger regulations to commit investors and developers to the housing cause on a more long-term basis. However, despite potential benefits, tax-incentivized housing production does not necessarily result in efficient or equitable housing solutions. In non-American contexts, its increased importance coincides with the emergence of market-oriented social welfare systems where affordable rents are set higher and where tenure is more flexible and heterogenous.

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Research paper thumbnail of Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England

Critical Housing Analysis, 2020

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Research paper thumbnail of La financiarización de los bienes raíces

Revista INVI

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Research paper thumbnail of The differential impact of real estate financialization on the political economies of Germany and France

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Research paper thumbnail of The Financialization of Real Estate

The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization

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Research paper thumbnail of The governance of affordable housing in post-crisis Amsterdam and Miami

Geoforum, 2021

Although academic scholarship has addressed how city governments have responded to declining hous... more Although academic scholarship has addressed how city governments have responded to declining housing affordability in the aftermath of crisis, few studies have done so from a comparative perspective. Filling this gap in the literature, this paper studies two distinctive, but nevertheless commonly 'unaffordable' city contexts: Amsterdam and Miami. First, it reconstructs how both cities responded differently to otherwise common housing challenges by prioritizing public interventionist (Amsterdam) and public entrepreneurial (Miami) housing strategies. Second, it unravels how the underlying logics and market outcomes of both approaches have nevertheless become similar. To varying degrees, both cases reveal a (i) progressive shift in social housing provision from lower income groups towards middle-income groups, and (ii) the increased importance of market logics within the affordable housing sector at large. Despite good intentions, the paper concludes that both cities struggle with addressing affordable housing needs in what are, after all, neoliberal housing contexts. In the absence of greater state commitments, local willingness to contest housing financialization runs into the limits of affordable housing governance.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Cuban migrants and the making of Havana's property market

Urban Geography, 2020

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally cir... more The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the "Global South". With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the trans-national real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba's cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into private restaurants or hotels. Central to our analysis is that the present development is not simply shaped by local or national demand and processes but also by international investment. We contend that a pattern of economic globalization unfolds where transnational remittances, rather than institutional investments or mortgage finance, steer Cuba's emerging property market, along with local investments among Cuban citizens.

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Research paper thumbnail of Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England

Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction w... more Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that 'financialised privatisation' is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.

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Research paper thumbnail of The de-financialization of housing: towards a research agenda

Housing financialization, or the increased dominance of financial markets in the housing sector, ... more Housing financialization, or the increased dominance of financial markets in the housing sector, has not stopped in the wake of the crisis. Rather, it has reinforced and rescaled itself, expanding into new market segments and urban territories. However, while academic scholarship has convincingly exposed the reconfiguration of financialization processes, it has paid surprisingly little attention to how these processes are also contested from within society and the economy. In response to this gap in the literature, I propose in this contribution a threefold research agenda, calling out for more research on (i) financial market reforms aimed at dismantling finance-led housing accumulation; (ii) policy focused on strengthening the public and affordable housing sector; and (iii) changing modes of urban governance and ‘anti-political’ social movements which can contest housing financialization locally. Taking into account these three fields of inquiry, I invite housing scholars to explore how – and if –de-financializing tendencies can become ecologically dominant in post-crisis urban housing markets.

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Research paper thumbnail of Postdoctoral Researcher: The Geography of Corporate Financialization & Two PhD candidates: The Making of Havana’s Property Market

The Division of Geography & Tourism at KU Leuven (Belgium) is looking for a full-time Postdoctora... more The Division of Geography & Tourism at KU Leuven (Belgium) is looking for a full-time Postdoctoral researcher for up to 22 months for the research project "The Geography of Corporate Financialization" as well as two full-time PhD candidates for 4 years for the research project "The Making of Havana’s Property Market".

The Geography of Corporate Financialization
The financialization of the economy is widely discussed in the literature, especially outside mainstream economics. For several countries, there is evidence of a shift towards finance at the level of the economy at large as well as regarding the financialization of households, but the literature on the financialization of traditionally non-financial firms is less conclusive. The problem is that our understandings—and our statistics—of manufacturing firms versus financial firms are becoming increasingly outdated and new data sources and conceptualizations are needed to understand the contemporary economy. Our first aim is to show to what extent non-financial corporations in different economic sectors across the globe exhibit different signs of financialization in their financial accounts. Our second aim is to arrive at an understanding of the reasons for as well as the workings and the consequences of financialization in non-financial corporations.

The Making of Havana’s Property Market
This study aims to reconstruct Cuba’s economic transition with a particular focus on the making of the property market in the country’s capital city of Havana. The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into the property markets of the ‘Global South’. The restrictions of underdeveloped financial and real estate markets in these countries have been turned into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. We propose to study market making practices that shape and reshape the Cuban property market following the regularization of private property in 2011. We focus on: 1) the emerging homeownership and tourism property markets; 2) the transnational flow of investment, especially from Cuban expats in Miami and elsewhere in the US; and 3) how households (small entrepreneurs) use opportunities in the tourism property market. Together these processes are constitutive to Havana’s emerging property market. The practices of local entrepreneurs and the inflow of capital from Cuban expats in Miami into Havana’s (tourism) property market are an entry into understanding Cuba’s socioeconomic transition towards market socialism. As such, our study also responds to the call to develop more multipolar and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory construction in an age of globalized and financialized capitalism. The first PhD candidate will focus on homeownership whereas the second PhD candidate will focus on property tourism.

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Research paper thumbnail of Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba

Tourism-led housing commodification: Transnational real estate networks and state-permeated property investment in Havana, Cuba, 2024

In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms o... more In a context of ever-growing demand for tourism property, this paper scrutinizes emerging forms of tourism-led housing commodification in Havana, Cuba. In 2011, the Cuban property market reopened to investment when the socialist government allowed the sale of private property at prices set in a market environment. We pay attention to the critical role of Cuban migrants, remittance investors and lifestyle elites in commodifying Havana's historic housing stock and transforming residential property into short-term rentals, hotels, private restaurants and tourist boutiques. We demonstrate how the Cuban government has become an active market facilitator, either by restraining private competition or by encapsulating tourism property investment within broader channels of the state. We conclude that the case of Havana is indicative of broader trends in tourism and hospitality, particularly in the Global South and East. We propose tourism-led housing commodification as a conceptual framework for understanding these broader commonalities.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Tourism-led Rentier Capitalism: Extracting Rent and Value from Tourism Property

antipode

A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property aro... more A highly heterogenous group of actors develops, owns, manages, and purchases tourism property around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the rise of 'tourism-led rentier capitalism'which is a particular fraction of capitaland its variegated dimensions. Although tourism property investors do not operate as a monolithic bloc or a socioeconomic class, they share similar interests and collectively reshape tourism destinations by extracting tourism rent, a form of monopoly and differential rent, which can be derived from natural and public goods or sign values and imaginations of places that imbue meaning and value into locational attributes. As such, they contribute to unevenly developed and variegated geographies of property investment which are nonetheless driven by common, underlying mechanisms and spatial practices. The conversion of tourism destinations into financialized accumulation frontiers is one broader outcome of tourismled rentier capitalism. The extraction of tourism rent is another.
Keywords: urban tourism; touristification; gentrification; financialization; Airbnb; short-term rentals; land rent.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Commodifying Havana? Private accumulation, assetisation and marketisation in the Cuban metropolis

Urban Studies

In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressu... more In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesised that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving ‘South’. However, even though transnational capital is finding its way into Southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven. In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalised free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process. Even so, non-debt bearing assetisation pressures are clearly redefining...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of CFP - Social Movements against Housing Financialization for Critical Housing Analysis

Critical Housing Analysis, 2023

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Commodifying Havana? Private accumulation, assetisation and marketisation in the Cuban metropolis

Urban Studies, 2023

In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressu... more In the Global South, cities are increasingly restructuring themselves around the financial pressures of international capital markets. Therefore, it is sometimes hypothesized that financial innovations created in the Global North are moving 'South.' However, even though transnational capital is finding its ways into southern regions and other areas of reform, the road towards urban commodification is bumpy and uneven. In Havana, Cuba, the government recently legalized free market home sales, contributing to an unprecedented transnational property boom where many homes were acquired by Cuban émigrés and nationals and converted into restaurants, hotels or short-term rentals. Nevertheless, due to endogenous and exogenous market restraints, the pandemic and complex interactions between state authorities and property-owning private entrepreneurs, Cuban-style commodification remains an incomplete and contested process. Even so, non-debt bearing assetization pressures are clearly redefining Havana's socialist property market. While the State encourages foreign direct investment into state-owned hotels and joint ventures, transnational remittances contribute to the commodification of Havana's private housing stock.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Cuban Migrants and the Making of Havana\u27s Property Market

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally cir... more The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the Global South . With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the transnational real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba\u27s cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into privat...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Cuban migrants and the making of Havana’s property market

Urban Geography, 2020

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The internationalization of commercial real estate markets in France and Germany

Competition & Change, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The Financialisation of Rental Housing 2.0: Releasing Housing into the Privatised Mainstream of Capital Accumulation

Antipode, 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The alternative financialization of the German housing market

Housing Studies, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Tax-incentivized housing production and the affordability crisis: International lessons from the low-income housing tax credit program in the United States

Housing Studies, 2022

Historically, many Western nations have subsidized public and affordable housing with public gran... more Historically, many Western nations have subsidized public and affordable housing with public grants and government-backed loans. However, in response to declining housing affordability and high land and development costs, various national governments are now introducing tax-based housing incentives to promote affordable housing production by private actors. Understanding the broader implications of this shift to tax subsidy and private investment, this review reflects on the market outcomes of arguably the most documented tax-based housing program in the Western world: the low-income housing tax credit program (LIHTC) in the United States. Although LIHTC remains a unique and distinctive instrument, some valuable lessons can be learned from it. In comparative terms, the program offers stricter affordability requirements than its counterparts introduced in countries like Australia, Chile, Colombia, France and Germany. Furthermore, it is accompanied by stronger regulations to commit investors and developers to the housing cause on a more long-term basis. However, despite potential benefits, tax-incentivized housing production does not necessarily result in efficient or equitable housing solutions. In non-American contexts, its increased importance coincides with the emergence of market-oriented social welfare systems where affordable rents are set higher and where tenure is more flexible and heterogenous.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England

Critical Housing Analysis, 2020

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of La financiarización de los bienes raíces

Revista INVI

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The differential impact of real estate financialization on the political economies of Germany and France

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The Financialization of Real Estate

The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The governance of affordable housing in post-crisis Amsterdam and Miami

Geoforum, 2021

Although academic scholarship has addressed how city governments have responded to declining hous... more Although academic scholarship has addressed how city governments have responded to declining housing affordability in the aftermath of crisis, few studies have done so from a comparative perspective. Filling this gap in the literature, this paper studies two distinctive, but nevertheless commonly 'unaffordable' city contexts: Amsterdam and Miami. First, it reconstructs how both cities responded differently to otherwise common housing challenges by prioritizing public interventionist (Amsterdam) and public entrepreneurial (Miami) housing strategies. Second, it unravels how the underlying logics and market outcomes of both approaches have nevertheless become similar. To varying degrees, both cases reveal a (i) progressive shift in social housing provision from lower income groups towards middle-income groups, and (ii) the increased importance of market logics within the affordable housing sector at large. Despite good intentions, the paper concludes that both cities struggle with addressing affordable housing needs in what are, after all, neoliberal housing contexts. In the absence of greater state commitments, local willingness to contest housing financialization runs into the limits of affordable housing governance.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Cuban migrants and the making of Havana's property market

Urban Geography, 2020

The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally cir... more The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the "Global South". With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the trans-national real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba's cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into private restaurants or hotels. Central to our analysis is that the present development is not simply shaped by local or national demand and processes but also by international investment. We contend that a pattern of economic globalization unfolds where transnational remittances, rather than institutional investments or mortgage finance, steer Cuba's emerging property market, along with local investments among Cuban citizens.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England

Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction w... more Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that 'financialised privatisation' is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The de-financialization of housing: towards a research agenda

Housing financialization, or the increased dominance of financial markets in the housing sector, ... more Housing financialization, or the increased dominance of financial markets in the housing sector, has not stopped in the wake of the crisis. Rather, it has reinforced and rescaled itself, expanding into new market segments and urban territories. However, while academic scholarship has convincingly exposed the reconfiguration of financialization processes, it has paid surprisingly little attention to how these processes are also contested from within society and the economy. In response to this gap in the literature, I propose in this contribution a threefold research agenda, calling out for more research on (i) financial market reforms aimed at dismantling finance-led housing accumulation; (ii) policy focused on strengthening the public and affordable housing sector; and (iii) changing modes of urban governance and ‘anti-political’ social movements which can contest housing financialization locally. Taking into account these three fields of inquiry, I invite housing scholars to explore how – and if –de-financializing tendencies can become ecologically dominant in post-crisis urban housing markets.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Postdoctoral Researcher: The Geography of Corporate Financialization & Two PhD candidates: The Making of Havana’s Property Market

The Division of Geography & Tourism at KU Leuven (Belgium) is looking for a full-time Postdoctora... more The Division of Geography & Tourism at KU Leuven (Belgium) is looking for a full-time Postdoctoral researcher for up to 22 months for the research project "The Geography of Corporate Financialization" as well as two full-time PhD candidates for 4 years for the research project "The Making of Havana’s Property Market".

The Geography of Corporate Financialization
The financialization of the economy is widely discussed in the literature, especially outside mainstream economics. For several countries, there is evidence of a shift towards finance at the level of the economy at large as well as regarding the financialization of households, but the literature on the financialization of traditionally non-financial firms is less conclusive. The problem is that our understandings—and our statistics—of manufacturing firms versus financial firms are becoming increasingly outdated and new data sources and conceptualizations are needed to understand the contemporary economy. Our first aim is to show to what extent non-financial corporations in different economic sectors across the globe exhibit different signs of financialization in their financial accounts. Our second aim is to arrive at an understanding of the reasons for as well as the workings and the consequences of financialization in non-financial corporations.

The Making of Havana’s Property Market
This study aims to reconstruct Cuba’s economic transition with a particular focus on the making of the property market in the country’s capital city of Havana. The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into the property markets of the ‘Global South’. The restrictions of underdeveloped financial and real estate markets in these countries have been turned into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. We propose to study market making practices that shape and reshape the Cuban property market following the regularization of private property in 2011. We focus on: 1) the emerging homeownership and tourism property markets; 2) the transnational flow of investment, especially from Cuban expats in Miami and elsewhere in the US; and 3) how households (small entrepreneurs) use opportunities in the tourism property market. Together these processes are constitutive to Havana’s emerging property market. The practices of local entrepreneurs and the inflow of capital from Cuban expats in Miami into Havana’s (tourism) property market are an entry into understanding Cuba’s socioeconomic transition towards market socialism. As such, our study also responds to the call to develop more multipolar and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory construction in an age of globalized and financialized capitalism. The first PhD candidate will focus on homeownership whereas the second PhD candidate will focus on property tourism.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact