The Financialization of Housing in Capitalism’s Peripheries

Financialization has become a new keyword to describe and analyze contemporary developments in economies and societies. It has also become a key concept in understanding recent trends in housing markets and policies. Since most scholarship that has initially studied these new trends was produced by scholars based in Europe, North America, and Australia and reflected on the dynamics of countries situated at the centers of the world economy, questions arose on the extent to which these trends could also be detected outside of these countries. The call for articles that originated this special issue was intended to collectively answer this question: Does the financialization of housing shape, and is it shaped by, housing policies and practices in countries situated at the peripheries of the global economy? The initial call for articles referred to these other territories and economies as the Global South. Although the term Global South is generally juxtaposed with the term Global North, which suggests a very strong binary, the idea was not to employ the term in this binary fashion. Rather, Global South was used as a shorthand or heuristic device to focus on countries other than Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, or those of Europe. We also could have opted for terms like nonrich, poor, non-Western, Third World, developing, or underdeveloped countries. The denominations born of postwar decolonization processes, which are founded on the discourse in which Truman launched the Point 4 Program, divided the world into advanced, modern, and developed countries on one hand, and traditional, backward, and underdeveloped countries on the other. Development aid was thought to enable everyone to reach, at some point, the desired stage of a developed country. In the 1960s, multilateral agencies and central universities adopted a new epithet in the same direction: developing countries. But like the term Global South, these are all problematic terms. They all have links to specific modes of organizing the globe that, throughout modern history, very often produced a dualistic view of the world. Most recently, denominations follow each other in quick succession and compete: South, Global South, emerging economies. Classification systems produce and reproduce a representation of the world and of the positions occupied by different individuals, social groups, and collective actors, but also by territories. South– North and Global South–Global North classifications are highly indebted to the tradition of geographic regionalization, which is based on homogeneities. In reality, there are more complex constellations of countries. We do not intend to resolve such issues in this special issue. Instead, we would like to focus on the financialization of housing in countries located at the peripheries of the world economy, with the specific goal of rejecting binary thinking about financialization processes. A common critique in the financialization literature is that the concept is used to suggest that the same process takes place across the globe and erases differences, resulting in increased convergence between countries and, in this case, their housing systems. This is not at all what we suggest. We see financialization as a process that unfolds across space—that is, it is structured by existing institutions in those spaces and it is restructuring those very institutions. Financialization is not a generalized process that erases existing differences across place and space. There is no model prescribing what