IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change – Serie

Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.

Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.

Since the birth of Airbnb in 2008, many of the world's cities have been transformed by platform-mediated short-term accommodation—a phenomenon suspected of disturbing local life and removing dwellings from local housing inventories. Drawing on mixed-method, multi-level comparative research in twelve large European cities, coauthors Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli, and Claire Colomb show that strikingly different regulatory regimes have emerged around short-term rentals.In some cities, policies aim to curb this practice; in others, regulations are simply meant to support the market. These responses are motivated by a variety of political choices and pressures, from grassroots movements to property interests, the tourism industry, and municipal welfare and housing systems. This book makes a crucial contribution to comparative urban politics in the twenty-first century, investigating the capacity of local states to govern housing markets and platform capitalism in an era of globalized human and capital flows. In the face of this worldwide shift, Housing Under Platform Capitalism insists that institutions and regulations can champion the public good by protecting the right to housing and ultimately limiting corporate power.

Since the birth of Airbnb in 2008, many of the world's cities have been transformed by platform-mediated short-term accommodation—a phenomenon suspected of disturbing local life and removing dwellings from local housing inventories. Drawing on mixed-method, multi-level comparative research in twelve large European cities, coauthors Thomas Aguilera, Francesca Artioli, and Claire Colomb show that strikingly different regulatory regimes have emerged around short-term rentals.In some cities, policies aim to curb this practice; in others, regulations are simply meant to support the market. These responses are motivated by a variety of political choices and pressures, from grassroots movements to property interests, the tourism industry, and municipal welfare and housing systems. This book makes a crucial contribution to comparative urban politics in the twenty-first century, investigating the capacity of local states to govern housing markets and platform capitalism in an era of globalized human and capital flows. In the face of this worldwide shift, Housing Under Platform Capitalism insists that institutions and regulations can champion the public good by protecting the right to housing and ultimately limiting corporate power.

A new “bulldozer politics” has taken hold in many Indian cities, destroying neighborhoods and displacing city residents as it pursues a global city aesthetic. Presentist accounts might explain these evictions as emergent modes of capital accumulation, but Logics of Dispossession challenges that story and situates these acts in a longer historical durée. Employing a comparative genealogical approach to historical analysis, Liza Weinstein traces the Indian government’s power to evict—from its beginnings in the colonial capitals of the British Raj, to developmental state-building projects and the rise of ethnonationalist politics, up to the present neoliberal conjuncture. Drawing on multicity fieldwork, archival research, and a database of more than a thousand eviction cases, Weinstein argues that evictions constitute a historically entrenched tool of city governance, motivated by a shifting set of intersecting, often contradictory logics that have accumulated over time and in locally specific ways across Indian cities aspiring to be world-class.