1,721,085 research outputs found
Out of place : Doreen Massey, radical geographer
No full textDoreen Massey changed geography. As a creative scholar, an inspiring teacher
and a restless activist, she initiated new ways of seeing, understanding and
indeed changing the world. She launched critiques, both in the relatively
small world of economic geography and the much bigger worlds of social
theory and progressive politics, which would prove to be truly transformative; she developed arguments against a host of establishment and orthodox positions that left something better and more productive in their place; she confronted structurally embedded power relations, most notably of class and gender, while steadfastly resisting political and analytical foreclosure; and she started conversations that continue to resonate and reverberate, not least those around the protean potential of place, even in these challenging times
The new enclosure: a view on landownership from Sydney
No full textChristophers Brett, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. London: Verso Books, 2018; 384 pp. 9781786631589, £16.00 (hbk); 9781786631596, £11.99 (pbk); 9781786631619, £12.00 (eBook
Mind the rent gap : Blackstone, housing investment and the reordering of urban rent surfaces
No full textRecent years have seen a burst of new writing on the opening and closing of urban rent gaps. Such studies generally consider individual cases. Rarely does the opportunity arise to readily compare and contrast rent gaps across multiple cities and territories, least of all within the context of a single developer or investor portfolio. Such an opportunity has arisen in the past decade, however, as the US investment firm Blackstone has pursued a multi-territory housing-investment strategy specifically of identifying and closing rent gaps, which it styles 'buy it, fix it, sell it'. This article examines that strategy and the varying nature of its implementation in Danish, German, Swedish and US cities. It argues that the rent gap is a paradoxical phenomenon: vast gaps, promising vast profits, frequently open up and frequently remain open for long periods before being closed - if they are closed at all. A primary reason is that successful and profitable closure requires not just favourable local political-economic conditions but a singularly well-funded, determined and aggressive investor - an investor, that is, such as Blackstone
How and Why US Single-Family Housing Became an Investor Asset Class
No full textHaving historically been avoided by institutional financial investors, U.S. single-family housing-that is, free-standing residential property-received large investment inflows after the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 to rapidly become a substantial asset class. Why? And why then? The materialization of an unprecedented investment opportunity-large stocks of cheap, favorably located urban housing-was certainly pivotal. But the attractiveness of that opportunity was enhanced by a series of parallel and (for investors) propitious historical shifts in four key realms: technology, finance, housing supply, and ideas. In short, the investment transformation that occurred was "overdetermined." The article develops this argument with a focus on investment by the firm that led the way: the Blackstone Group
Environmental Beta or How Institutional Investors Think about Climate Change and Fossil Fuel Risk
No full textIt is widely recognized that to limit the long-term extent of global warming and its socioecological consequences, the world must transition over future decades to a low- or zero-carbon economy. Among the many imponderables relating to this eventual transition is the role of the principal owners of the fossil fuel companies that are primarily responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions-namely, institutional financial investors. The investment behavior of these institutions will substantively shape not only the speed and nature of the economy and society's transition to cleaner energy sources but also the speed and nature of the global financial system's own parallel transition to a low- or zero-carbon world. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, governments and regulators around the world are increasingly concerned that the latter transition might represent a major potential source of future financial instability. These authorities are calling on institutional investors to effect an orderly and measured transition by fully recognizing the climate-related risks of investment in fossil fuel companies and pricing these risks appropriately. Yet they are doing so in the absence of informed, up-to-date, and meaningful knowledge of how the investment community actually thinks about climate change and fossil fuel risk. This article maps out the key lineaments of this thinking on the basis of an extensive program of interviews with global investment institutions. Contra government and regulator hopes and expectations, this thinking indicates that fossil fuel investment is set to be a long-term locus of excess, not minimal, financial market volatility: of environmental beta
Fossilised Capital : Price and Profit in the Energy Transition
No full textGetting renewable energies to a position of price competitiveness with fossil fuels has long been seen as a key challenge to the counter-carbon energy transition. Less discussed, but more significant to future investment trajectories in the capitalist global economy, is the relative profitability of fossil-fuel and renewable-energy production. Having recently pledged over the next few decades to decrease hydrocarbon production and increase renewable-energy generation, Europe's three oil and gas majors - BP, Shell and Total - now institutionally straddle the two energy worlds and their respective economic dynamics. This article takes stock of the companies' announcements and of the existing investment and profit landscape to assess the prospects for their own corporate energy transitions and thus for the global energy transition more broadly
Class, Assets and Work in Rentier Capitalism
No full text'Render capitalism' is the term increasingly used to describe economies dominated by rentiers, rents, and rent-generating assets. A growing body of scholarship considers how the ownership of such assets by individuals and households is reshaping patterns of class and inequality and accordingly requires the reconceptualisation of the latter phenomena. The significance of company-owned assets and corporate rents for class, inequality and their conceptualisation has not been considered, however. This article offers an exploratory investigation along these lines, highlighting the importance of employees' working relationship to company-owned, rent-generating assets for their class position. The article further reflects on how developments in this regard might be approached from the perspective of Marx's writing on value, labour and class, and the challenges that those developments potentially pose to Mandan concepts
Undoing apartheid? From land reform to credit reform in South Africa
Get PDFBoth land and credit in South Africa - the twin bases of apartheid - proved to need reforming when that country gained its political freedom. Both proved problematic. Land reform was charged with remedying all the problems of apartheid, but people had little wish to return to a forgotten rural past. Instead they desired upward mobility and a modern lifestyle, of a kind that only access to credit could deliver. Although the state was able to deliver democratic freedoms, it could not—in a newly liberalised economy—deliver the means necessary to enjoy the life of the free person: only borrowing could do that. Curbing it would require not only that ‘reckless lenders’ stop extending loans but also that ‘reckless borrowers’ stop availing themselves of these. But if lenders operated by the logic of the self-regulating free market, then why was state regulation required to restrain them from offering products that were leading borrowers into penury
Financialization of Singaporean Banks and the Production of Variegated Financial Capitalism
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