Urban Production from Manufacturing to Financialisation : the Case of China (original) (raw)

This is an expanded version of: - Aalbers MB (2018b) Financial geography II: Financial geographies of housing and real estate. Progress in Human Geography DOI:10.1177/0309132518819503. - Aalbers MB (2019a) Financial geography III: The financialization of the city. Progress in Human Geography, in press. Financial geography is often understood as the geographies of money and finance, but this paper takes a different understand in which financial geography is a lens that can be applied to a range of topics (Aalbers, 2018a). This approach follows my historiography of financial geography, which suggests that financial geography is not simply a sub-sub-discipline embedded in economic geography; the field of financial geography is equally rooted in the sub-disciplines of political and urban geography (Aalbers, 2015a) and in this literature review I will look at a frontier of financial geography, that is, the intersection of economic and urban geography. My goal here is not to foreground ‘the city’ or ‘the urban’ as the privileged site of applying a financial geography lens, but rather a pragmatic choice to demonstrate how a financial lens can help to enrich different fields of geographical research. My conceptualization of the city is equally pragmatic: for the purpose of the literature review in this paper, I use it primarily as a container term to include studies of urban governance, housing, real estate and the built environment. This review is not the place to discuss the nature of ‘the urban’. It is also worth pointing out what I have not included here: studies of financial centres, such as the City of London, Wall Street, Raffles Place or Bandra Kurla. Research of financial centres and districts is, in a way, the recognized core of geographies of money and finance, not the frontier I want to prioritise here. In the following sections, I will first discuss financial geographies of housing, with a focus on mortgage debt, securitization and the rise of corporate landlords, but also the financialization of construction firms and social housing non-profits. Subsequent sections zoom in on financial geographies of 1) commercial real estate and large urban projects; and 2) the local state and (semi-)public sector. Finally, I draw some conclusions based on the cumulation of findings, diversity of perspectives, and spatialities and temporalities of financialization. In this literature review I have tried to include literature from non-English speaking countries where possible.