Editorial: The Geography of the COVID‐19 Pandemic Aalbers, Manuel B.; Beerepoot, Niels; Gerritsen, Martijn
Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie,
July 2020, 2020-07-00, 20200701, Letnik:
111, Številka:
3
Journal Article
The financialization literature tries to make sense of how the world has been changing and continues to do so. There is real potential for financialization to conjoin real-world processes and ...practices that are conceptually treated as discrete entities. Financialization is an inherently spatial phenomenon that should be much more central to economic–geographic analysis, explaining how the financialization of the global economy is tied to financialization at other scales as well as to the financialization of the state, economic sectors, individual firms, and daily life.
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been around since 1960 but have only become major players in housing markets in the last twenty years. The current and ongoing wave of residential REIT ...(R-REIT) expansion has attracted significant scholarly and broader public interest. This article examines how real estate, finance, and the state are configured in relation to each other through R-REITs. While much of the housing financialization literature has focused on the real estate/state axis of this relationship, we explore the underexamined connections between the real estate/finance axis and the finance/state axis of the real estate-finance-state triangle. We analyze the financial accounts of the world's fifteen largest publicly traded R-REITs and R-REIT-like funds in the two largest markets: the United States and Germany. Our findings demonstrate how the ownership of R-REIT stock is remarkably homogeneous: the largest shareholders in each of the studied R-REITs are the three largest index exchange-traded funds, which are heavily backed by pension fund capital. For these investors, it is important that R-REITs provide a healthy return on investment at the lowest possible risk. The investors require the state, in its various guises, to guarantee attractive risk-adjusted returns on R-REITs investments. We identify six dimensions of state de-risking in this context, deepening our understanding of the role of the state in housing financialization. It is the state that creates the trust in real estate investment trusts, and it thus is what generates the investment in real estate investment trusts.
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'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.
In this TESG Forum, we revisit Torsten Hägerstrand's 1982 Diorama, Path and Project, a paper that significantly expanded Hägerstrand's time‐geographical conceptual vocabulary in the international ...geographical literature. The paper was the crystallization of a process where Hägerstrand tried to bridge regional science ideas with humanistic ones. The ‘diorama’ was introduced to discuss how imaginations emerge from the togetherness of objects and memories in localized space and initially formulated to help geography overcome the disciplinary fragmentation and paradigmatic rows that had splintered geography in the 1970s. ‘Path’ is Hägerstrand's well‐known concept describing people's spatial pattern of activities. Finally, the concept of ‘project’ tried to capture a broader conception of agency that was able to accommodate people's paths as the result of goal‐intended and value‐inspired actions. In this introductory essay, we contextualize the paper in the development of Hägerstrand's work and introduce the separate contributions to the Forum.
Has the post-war managerial approach to urban governance in the Netherlands and Flanders been replaced by more entrepreneurial and financialized forms? In this paper, we study the transformation of ...urban governance in the Low Countries through city case studies of Apeldoorn (Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium). We show how Dutch urban governance is financialized by connecting local public finance with financialized real estate markets through municipal land banks. However, inter-municipal financial solidarity and ring-fencing municipalities from financial markets create specific continental European processes of financialization. Flemish municipalities, in contrast, have shifted from a model of laissez-faire urban development (embedded in a system of large municipal autonomy) towards entrepreneurial urban growth regimes, in which technocratic public and private actors have increased access to public financial resources, which are used to create large urban renewal projects. In Belgium, autonomous municipal real estate corporations are a crucial instrument for connecting municipal finance to the real estate market.
The private rental sector (PRS) is making a surprising comeback. A central argument in our paper is that we see the rise of PRS and the associated stagnation of homeownership as springing from the ...contradictions inherent to financialized homeowner societies. Rather than a feature of either mature or late homeowner societies, contradictions of the promotion of homeownership through the expansion of mortgage markets paved the way for a revival of the PRS. Our case is the Netherlands, but our argument has a wider remit. We sketch the dominant trends in Dutch housing policy and present an overview of the rise of PRS and Buy-To-Let in Dutch cities. We identify how housing policies and realities have driven a shift from a debt-driven to a wealth-driven model of financialization, in which the demand for PRS as an investment class and as a place to live has become central.
While population losses have accompanied urban development since the emergence of the first cities, it has only been quite recently that "shrinkage" has become a field of research in its own rights. ...Critical scholarly research stands in a somewhat difficult relation to this situation. On the one hand, there are numerous contributions calling for a general "acceptance" of shrinkage and more "openness" towards planning for a reduced population size. On the other hand, one can find contributions that criticize the limits of existing rightsizing policies, describing smart shrinkage as an exclusionary project, or set it into a context of the current austerity moment. The evaluation of this new round of urban policies is thus controversial. The common denominator of the papers in this special issue is a call for both widening the perspective on rightsizing policies by embedding them into a wider context of neoliberal urbanization and a demand for more attention towards context-specific pathways, dynamics and outcomes. At the same time, we want to highlight not only the local specificities but also provide a comparative political economy perspective on shrinking cities.
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 capital—and its variegated dimensions. Although tourism property investors do not operate as a monolithic bloc or a socio‐economic 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 financialised accumulation frontiers is one broader outcome of tourism‐led rentier capitalism. The extraction of tourism rent is another.
Resumen
Existe un grupo muy heterogéneo de actores que desarrolla, posee, gestiona y adquiere propiedades turísticas en todo el mundo. En este artículo analizamos el auge del “capitalismo rentista impulsado por el turismo”—que es una fracción particular del capital—y sus variadas dimensiones. Aunque los inversores en propiedades turísticas no operan como un bloque monolítico o una clase socioeconómica, comparten intereses similares y remodelan colectivamente los destinos turísticos extrayendo rentas turísticas, una forma de renta monopolística y diferencial que puede derivarse de los bienes naturales y públicos o de atributos locales impregnados de significado y valor según determinados imaginarios de lugar. Así, este grupo contribuye al desarrollo desigual y a una geografía de inversión inmobiliaria que muestra gran diversidad, pero a la que subyacen mecanismos y prácticas espaciales comunes. Los resultados son la conversión de los destinos turísticos en fronteras de acumulación financiarizadas y la extracción de rentas turísticas.
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