Paper Abstracts

 

Keynote 1
Rent seeking landscapes, dispossessions and the burst of democracy

Raquel Rolnik (University of Sao Paulo)

What are the present links between contemporary three global processes: the capture of built space as a tradable asset capable to generate rent to an incredible mass of surplus capital circulating in the financial circuits; evictions, displacements and banishments at a major scale and the global crisis of democracy? The lecture will try to answer this question, by navigating in different local urban contexts, focusing on the specificities and commonalities of the present housing crisis around the world.

 

Keynote 2
Speculative Urbanization and Property Hegemony: Asian Perspectives
Hyun Bang Shin (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Condensed development experiences, especially in Asia, have translated into expectations for speculative construction of ‘fast cities’ where time and space are compressed to materialize ‘real’ Asia experiences. In this talk, I first discuss how such Asian experiences can only be understood by placing them in specific historical-geographical conjunctures, which accompany particular configurations of socio-political and state-capital relations. Then, I further explore what this ‘Asian speculative urbanization’ and its global outreach, means for our understanding of planetary gentrification and financialization of real estate in the contemporary capitalism that sees the increasing presence of ‘Asian capital’.

Panel 1: Elements in the Financialization of Cities 1

The Contested Urbanisms of Abandonment

Maria Arquero de Alarcon (University of Michigan)

Like perhaps no other city in the world, Detroit exemplifies the triumph and tragedy of the meteoric rise of the prototypical “industrial capitalist city” followed by its precipitous fall into abandonment and ruin. Having lost two-thirds of its population since the 1950s, Detroit appears as the quintessential exemplar of failed urbanism in the post-industrial age. While disinvestment and socioeconomic restructuring have produced asymmetrical spatial patterns of vitality surrounded by blight and neglect, a closer examination of these uneven dynamics can assist us in imagining alternative futures.

Looking at three particularly distressed neighborhoods provides a finely-grained account of the multiple and complex structural forces that produced abandonment in these places. These neighborhoods embody the worst excesses of capitalist modernity and its failure to realize the promise of progress. Large tracts of vacant land and abandoned and blighted buildings have condemned these places to a condition of permanent marginality, peripheral backwaters far removed from the conventional expectations of investment and growth. These neighborhoods are at once actual locations and imagined places, inextricably tied to distinct histories and subjected to heterogeneous patterns of decline and blight.

Local narratives portray their distrust with contemporary forms of land-grabbing and speculation in the city. On one side, large swaths of vacant property owned by the Detroit Land Bank are leased or bargained to innovative land uses with the promise of taxes and jobs. On the other, the lack of adequate financing options for low-income residents and racially discriminatory lending practices continue to restrict credit for families, particularly in the poorer areas of the city. Under these circumstances, speculators offering land contracts on dilapidated housing becomes the only way to secure shelter for many low-income residents.

This project examines a variety of source materials through provisional, critical cartographies that overlay official and unofficial planning documents, newspaper accounts, media commentaries, and interviews with key informants. Despite the overwhelming presence of blight and chronic lack of investment and official support, the project reveals how this legacy of neglect have nonetheless instigated the emergence of contested, alternative urban imaginaries.

 

The globalization and agencification of authoritarian government in urban Morocco

Koenraad Bogaert (Ghent University)

Since the start of the 21^st century, Moroccan cities like Rabat, Casablanca and Tangiers became the privileged vehicles of economic regeneration and capital accumulation as well as testing grounds for the re-invention of (authoritarian) politics and urban government. This presentation considers the relational and spatial transformation of authoritarian government in Morocco over the last decades in a context of structural adjustment and neoliberal urbanism. While this involved transformations that already started during the reign of late King Hassan II, his succession by Mohamed VI can nevertheless be considered a key moment that symbolizes a fundamental shift in Moroccan authoritarianism. Whereas Hassan II ruled with an iron hand during the years of lead, Mohammed VI rules via holdings, funds, and specialized state agencies. The variegated urban mega-projects that marked the reign of Mohammed VI demonstrate not only the durability of authoritarian government but also its transformation from neo-patrimonial, clientelistic, and kinship-based forms of political practices toward a more globalized modality of authoritarian urban government. In other words, the transformation of the Moroccan city tells a broader story about the transformation of politics, the state, and the economy within a context of globalization and neoliberal reform. What matters here are not just the material changes in the urban landscape, but how these projects reveal new political practices and agency that materialize in the interplay between global capitalism and local places such as Rabat and Casablanca.

We can understand this shift as a more general strategy to take all large development projects and government dossiers out of the hands of conventional and elected state government institutions in favor of an “agencification” of public policy. The process of agencification in Morocco entails that important governmental decisions have been increasingly concentrated in exceptional governmental zones and entrusted to new state agencies where that power is shared with and made accountable to global capital, resulting in decisions made ‘elsewhere’, outside the scope and boundaries of the ‘national state’ or ‘the regime’. As such, the presentation questions some of the promises and logics behind Morocco’s urbanism of mega-projects. While they are presented and marketed as sites of new political imaginaries, future aspirations and expectations of economic prosperity, more often they produce new ways of social exclusion and actual feelings of marginalization and exclusion.

Creating rent gaps in Beirut

Marieke Krijnen (Academic Editor)

This presentation looks at how state-legitimized power and agents of capital created rent gaps in Beirut by lowering actual ground rent and increasing potential ground rent, leading to acute housing crises for the city’s inhabitants who were displaced or excluded by high prices. The legal and institutional framework was responsible for creating these rent gaps: laws pertaining to construction, rents, heritage preservation and so on all influenced the actual and potential ground rent that can be reaped from a plot. Moreover, potential ground rents were influenced by the accessibility and location of plots relative to central areas, indicating a complementarity between rent gap theory and neoclassical land rent theory. Besides the legal and institutional framework, however, rent gaps were created by informal, illegal and exceptionalist practices as well as conflict and war-related displacement. Taking these factors into account is crucial to understanding urban change related to vacancy in many cities across the globe, and attunes rent gap theory to a more global and cosmopolitan perspective. It also points to possible ways of mitigating housing crises by not only changing the legal and institutional framework, but also looking beyond that at the role of informal, illegal and exceptionalist practices and conflict and war-related displacement.

 

National Planning for the Day After: Social Reproduction, the Built Environment, and the State Process in Palestine

Kareem Rabie (American University)

Based on my ethnographic work on large-scale private housing developments, urban and national planning, and the state idea in the West Bank, in this presentation, I will discuss the ways the future is understood, practiced, and shaped through interventions into the built environment. I will analyze the shift from Oslo-era national planning for a future sovereign government, to contemporary planning emphasizing the state, essentially, as a scale of market organization to ensure future economic growth.

As the international scaffolding of conflict is oriented away from public governance as a primary objective, Palestinians and international organizations work to shape government priorities to enhance private investment and reform laws to enable it. In the peculiar West Bank market, housing and the idea of scarcity are at the center of national planning as a scale of investment and container for ideas about the future. Housing acts as precedent for changing property regimes, relationships to the land, and typology. It tangibly expresses priorities in the landscape. Homes are sites of family life and social reproduction, and places where Palestinians shape personal politics, possibilities, and aspiration. New housing presupposes, produces attachments among, and incorporates Palestinians into new contexts and plans.

New planned housing is fundamental to shaping the future of Palestine as a legal entity, a form of economic organization, topography, and a social formation. By combining ethnographic material on housing and with planners, with discussion of national planning priorities as they changed from a kind of technocratic state-orientation around Oslo to a more immaterial and ideological framework for market organization, I ask how national planners, private developers, and ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank envision priorities for a future crafted from the present.

Panel 2: Elements in the Financialization of Cities 2

Building Master-Planned, Holistically-Designed Cities from Scratch: Waterfall City (Johannesburg)

Martin J. Murray (University of Michigan)

Located halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the mixed-use mega-development called Waterfall City is a holistic, master-planned, holistically-designed, and privately-owned urban enclave built entirely from scratch on 2,200 hectares of vacant land.  Along with a similar mega-project called Steyn City located nearby, Waterfall City represents a new prototype for city building in urban Africa.  This mixed-use enclave includes office space, residential components, and leisure-entertainment zones.   Waterfall City combines a hyper-modernist stress on ‘smart’ growth, cutting-edge technologies, and state-of-the-art infrastructure with the New Urbanist focus on mixed-use facilities, a human-scale built environment, and pedestrian-friendly precincts.  Equally important, it is an entirely ‘private city’ where everything from the utilities and security, to schools and hospitals are managed by private firms.  By performing all the conventional functions expected of a municipal administration, the real estate developers at Waterfall City have effectively replaced public authority with private management and control.  Apart from its sheer size and scale, the outstanding feature of Waterfall City is its unique blend of stern religious conformity (grounded in a traditional interpretation of Islamic principles) combined with a forward-looking commitment to private enterprise and consumerist consumption.  This research is based on in-depth interviews with stakeholders and planners, along with on-site investigations over six years.

 

Selective financialization in peripheral geographies: the paradox of (unsecured) lending in South African townships

Dr. Liza Rose Cirolia (African Center for Cities, University of Cape Town)

Researchers focused on the financialization of cities argue that urban infrastructure and real estate have become an important asset class for institutional investors and that urban states have been forced to be increasingly entrepreneurial in nature. Many southern cities, however, challenge this story, presenting fiscal and financial dynamics which are more relational, less episodic, and more complex. The South African case is a useful exploration of the complex ways finance operates in cities.  Over the past twenty-five years, the South African state has built almost four million fully subsidized houses for the urban poor. Among other things, the aim of this program has been to equipped Black people with a tangible asset, allowing for upward mobility through home and land ownership. As the state built new ‘townships’, the banks were encouraged (and incentivized) to support the formation of a vibrant housing market through lending programs. However, since the early 2000s, the banks have refused to provide mortgages in townships areas, instead preferring to radically increase unsecured lending to poor households for goods such as clothing, furniture, and food. The result has been unprecedented indebtedness, delinked from fixed assets. The South African case, shows how the poor have been incorporated into financialized flows in deeply selective and deleterious ways.

 

Thinking the limits and possibilities of housing struggles in post-crisis cities

Cesare Di Feliciantonio (Manchester Metropolitan University)

In the context of post-crisis urban and political transformations, the housing question has attained central importance, especially in those countries most severely hit by the debt crisis and austerity policies, such as Ireland, Italy, and Spain. Contentious housing movements have emerged in response to increasing housing insecurity and the inadequate response of formal institutions, challenging the main model at work characterized by the hegemony of (private debt-led) homeownership, the lack of social and affordable housing, and increasing foreclosure/eviction rates and homelessness. Based on fieldwork I conducted in Barcelona, Dublin, and Rome between 2012 and 2016, I reflect in this talk on the uneven long-term results of these movements in terms of reshaping policies and public discourse, opening new political horizons. When discussing these results, I highlight the importance of three main factors: the violence (and the forms) of the housing crisis; the instrumental use of ‘rules’ by formal institutions; the work on the self by activists and their engagement with the politics of difference. The choice to highlight the limits and the uneven results of these initiatives is not aimed at shutting down the ‘politics of possibilities’ behind them, the paper acknowledging the construction of immaterial infrastructures as a key-factor to lead future struggles.

*Part of the argument presented in the talk results from the joint work with Dr Cian O’Callaghan (Trinity College Dublin)

 

The urban dimension of Lebanon’s financial crisis
Hisham Ashkar (Lebanese University)

As the financial crisis in Lebanon was unfolding during November 2019, and protestors filled the streets, the governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank, uncharacteristically, called for a press conference. In this rare occasion, the governor tried to reassure depositors of money supply, and their liberty to use any amounts of money from their accounts conditioning it is within Lebanon: “they can transfer it from one bank to another, do whatever they wish with it, invest in real estates, etcetera.” The real estate example was not random. It was rather emblematic of Lebanon’s post-war economic model, in which construction was considered the engine of economic growth, but which also led to real estate booms and busts. It might be a stretch to put real estate busts at the root of the financial crisis, however, real estate did play a significant role in amplifying the crisis. And it is this role that will be explored in this presentation by explaining the real estate bubble of 2005-2011, examining the post-2011 real estate crisis, and uncovering the impact of the current financial crisis on real estate and housing sectors. This review will be done mainly by analyzing the roles played by both the state and the banking sector. Furthermore, and for an in-depth and wider comprehension of the situation, I rely on a non-culturalist understanding of the Lebanese economic system. I also find it necessary to revisit seemingly obvious terms such as capitalism, debt, or money, by departing from a classical/neo-classical economic reading.

 

Keynote 3

Financializing the “Slum”: Uncertainty, Resistance, and Negotiation in the Redevelopment of Informal Settlements in Mumbai, India

Liza Weinstein (Northeastern University)

As international and domestic Indian investors have set their sights on government-backed informal settlement upgrading as a site for land acquisition and capital accumulation, efforts to financialize land have increasingly had to contend with claims-making by residents of informal settlements. While scholars contributing to the expanding study of financialization have increasingly recognized the need to “variegate” understandings of the local markets, institutions, and actors involved in these processes, few studies have focused on ground-level resistance and negotiation between local developers and residents to understand financialization at such a local scale. This talk, which draws on a case study of an internationally financed luxury housing development in the Mahalaxmi Dhobighat area of Central Mumbai, is part of an effort to bring the study of financialization to this local level. Drawing on interviews with financiers, developers, and residents of the Dhobighat jhopadpati (slum), this research reveals that in an effort to reduce the uncertainty associated with land acquisition, local developers – identified in recent studies of financialization of Indian real estate as key intermediaries – expend considerable effort negotiating with and responding to the claims of community leaders and residents. This talk will also situate the case of Mahalaxmi Dhobighat in the thirty-year history of slum redevelopment in Mumbai, and will demonstrate that over this period both local developers and jhopadpati residents and community leaders have become increasingly adept at these negotiations. The talk will conclude by demonstrating that if we are to produce a variegated conception of financialization, particularly in the political contentious informal settlements that are attracting the interest of financiers and developers, further attention will need to be paid to the ground level politics of land acquisition.

 

Panel 3: Bottom-up Resistance

Minor geographies and the activist mode of existence
Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield)

Research-activism is a conundrum many of us grapple with. Is it even possible to be an ‘activist’ and a ‘researcher’ at the same time? How should one define the politics of activist research, and then embrace it in everyday intellectual praxis? And why should we bother? On the basis of my experiences through urban margins across Europe, the paper discusses the first core of geography (the encounter with earthly lives) and the second (representation) as fueled by a specific intellectual politics (activism) which encompasses various domains, beyond un-helpful distinctions of ‘research’ and ‘action’ (mode of existence). The paper builds upon and expand geographical literature around activism, urban politics and knowledge production, to re-centre academic labour as a specific ‘minor’ endeavor that is never deprived of politics and urges, therefore, to construct situated forms of accompliceship and engaged modes of embodiment.

Carving out a model: the experience of FICA Fund in São Paulo, Brazil
Bianca Antunes (FICA)

In early 2015, a multidisciplinary group came together in São Paulo, Brazil, to discuss issues surrounding non-speculative property: was it possible to create alternatives to the private speculative real estate market? Was it possible for civil society to hold property and make it available at affordable prices? That was the beginning of what is now known as the FICA Fund, a non-profit civil society association designed to hold property for social purposes. Since its formalization institutionalization in 2015, it has worked primarily through a donation from a crowdfunding contribution that goes to a fund to buy and safeguard real estate. As of January 2020, FICA has 115 monthly supporters, one apartment and a sum of money enough to buy a second flat. The first apartment was acquired in 2017, followed by decisions about who should occupy it and under what terms. The contract is quite conventional and generally operates in accordance with Brazilian law, with the exception that FICA does not require a guarantor, one of the main barriers that low-income families entering the formal housing market have to overcome. Today, the challenge is to scale up and address a series of issues: how do we operate within national regulatory frameworks? What constitutes a fair/affordable rent? How should we deal with default? These questions stimulate the debate around social rent, reframing and reformulating old challenges. There are many issues that remain unresolved and many others that will arise as the project grows. There are no definitive answers to such a new and novel experiment, but we continue to share our key learnings and our aspirations. 

 

Risk and Defiant Urbanism in ‘Unsafe Areas’ of Cairo

Dalia Wahdan (Nile University)

Defiance is a state of discursive determination to face pervasive forces that threaten lives and livelihoods. This paper examines how dwellers in one of Cairo’s “unsafe areas” defy urban policies as they go about making a living and shaping their built environments. “Unsafe areas” are a sub-category of unplanned or informal settlements that are deemed life-threatening by state agencies and slated for demolition or upgrading. Through ethnographic investigation and a quantitative audit of the built environment in two ‘unsafe’ areas in Cairo, this paper shows how successive policies and local popular practices have interchangeably contributed to the production and aggravation of risk. It also devises a built environment audit that considers ecological factors and broadens the conception of risk beyond the physical conditions of the built environment, which is the primary focus of the government’s audit.

The paper argues that governmental policies and practices on one hand and dwellers’ responses on the other are locked up in a dialectic of power. While state agencies seek to assert sovereignty over space and capture prime real estate values, dwellers innovate modes of asserting their right over the built environments and livelihoods. The dialectic manifests not only in the physical deterioration of the built environment but also in how the community perceives itself and their relationship with state agencies, at times conforming to or diverging from stigmatization, ruination, and forced evictions. The outcome is a perpetual mode of defiance where neither the state nor the dwellers win over urban space. Nevertheless, such a mode opens ways to reimagine urban built environments, which could expand the rights to the city.

Panel 4: Vacancy as Opportunities

Addressing urban vacancy: The promise and pitfalls of temporary use

Jeremy Nemeth (University of Colorado Denver)

Vacant, unused, or abandoned land can include raw dirt, spontaneously-vegetated plots, lots with recently razed buildings, brownfield or polluted sites, and land that contains long-term abandoned and derelict structures. Vacancy is rampant in some cities, and often results from shifts from an industrial to a service economy, suburban migration and overtly-racist redlining, unmitigated property speculation, and the shift to a more mobile workplace. Public officials work to “fix” the vacancy problem due to the perception of urban blight and diminished property investment, the cost of maintaining vacant properties, the deleterious appearance that signals further social breakdown, and the environmental hazards associated with abandonment. Interventions run the gamut from homebuyer supports to demolition to land banking to urban greening. Nearly all of these are more “permanent” solutions to the vacancy issue, and over the past few decades, results of these programs are decidedly mixed, especially since urban vacancy and decline is fundamentally a byproduct of inequitable political and economic systems that cannot be addressed through planning and policy reforms alone. Recognizing the latent potential of vacant land as a community resource, we need to rethink how we address vacant land. In this paper, I encourage planners and policymakers to more proactively include temporary uses in their toolboxes. Having defined vacant land, I show that most permanent interventions fail to live up to key benchmarks of distributive and procedural justice. I assess the temporary use model on these same components with particular attention to how it stands up to five propositions for just planning: inclusion, deliberation, recognition, transparency, and scale. I conclude by outlining the benefits and drawbacks of the temporary use model, and find that, if deployed with equity in mind, it can induce significant social and ecological benefits to affected communities.

 

The Cooperative City 

Daniela Patti (URBACT)

The Cooperative City is a project promoted by Eutropian, which aims at promoting the knowledge of community-based urban regeneration practices. In particular, the publication Funding the Cooperative City explores how citizen initiatives, cooperatives, non-profit companies, community land trusts, crowdfunding platforms, ethical banks, and anti-speculation foundations step out of the regular dynamisms of real estate development and arrange new mechanisms to access, purchase, renovate or construct buildings for communities. Through interviews and analyses, this book describes tendencies and contexts, and presents stories and models of community finance and civic economy. It offers a helpful set of resources not only for community organizations and initiators of civic spaces, but also for private developers, municipalities, and EU institutions that are willing to support, facilitate or cooperate with them in order to create more resilient and inclusive local communities, facilities and services. Based on this research, a number of projects were developed, such as Open Heritage, Generative Commons, and Place City.

 

Temporary projects as a tool for urbanism transitions.

Cécile Diguet (L’Institut Paris Region)

By occupying brownfields or settling in vacant and obsolete buildings, transitory urbanism succeeds in creating places of sociability and urbanity at a considerably faster pace than traditional urban project in France. While top-down urban development faces real difficulties in creating a genius loci, especially when the projects have wiped outexisting buildings, transitory urbanism succeeds, using the short-term as its asset.

It could be argued that all urban planning is transitory insofar as all territories change over time. However, we use “transition” here to denote the invention of an urbanism for times of “radical transitions”, transitions that result from the climate crisis, the collapse of biodiversity, and environmental pollution. The talk addresses these transitions from two main angles:

(1) How do these emerging, transitory practices call into question the urban project method, rooting it more locally, renewing modes of programming spaces, rejecting pre-planned decisions in favor of a continuous dialogue with experimental occupations? How can this method influence regulatory urban planning and produce changes in the diffuse fabric (outside major projects)?

(2) Is there a pendulum swing towards bottom-up approaches for public authorities? Is the bottom up exercised by conviction? Is it due to disengagement or the impossibility of practicing traditional planning in these times?

 

Through the talk, we show that transitory urbanism questions the traditional urban project method and the urban policies typically adopted by local authorities and the planning coalitions (e.g., municipalities, urbanists, planners, architects, urban designers, developers), questioning their ability to guide urban development via regulations or strategic planning, as well as the possibilities for these authorities to act on abadonned and/or vacant open spaces. Instead, the talk shows that transitory projects could lead to transitions urbanism that would (1) Facilitate the renovation and transformation of vacant and undervalued buildings and promote low-tech constructions, (2) Adjust urban development processed to match social needs, rather than market needs, and (3) Allow a political re-appropriation of the built environment, hence renewing collective action and encouraging the development of small-scale citizen projects.