Call for Papers

The production of urban space has changed profoundly in the last thirty years in the face of neoliberal agendas in terms of economic development and public policies and the growing importance of transnational circuits of finance. In this process, the real estate market gained relevance in the structural transformation of contemporary capitalism, recognized by authors from various fields of knowledge, such as financialization. The intensification of real estate production and the expansion of infrastructure investments in Latin American countries have indicated an increasing articulation between economic sectors, imposing new challenges to the analysis of the production of urban space, with an increasing association of public and private agents. In Brazil, the strong increase of the real estate market supported by the opening of capital of large developers and builders as well as by the housing policy that boosted this sector, have nourished an academic field recently. If the question of the financialization of urban production is well established in the European debate, the identification of convergences and dissonances between Latin American studies and between them and the international debate still needs to be discussed in-depth. After all, it is a capitalist restructuration and a reconfiguration of cities on a world level.

In this sense, the Workshop "Financialization and urban studies: cross-sectional views Europe and Latin America" seeks to cross European and Latin American perspectives on the structural changes in real estate and urban infrastructure since the 1970s. It searches, therefore, to present works that have been gaining evidence in the urban studies and to discuss their articulations with the tendencies that are present in the debate on the financialization, focusing on the following issues:

• the actors (financial and non-financial) that produce the cities;
• circuis of capital in real estate and urban infrastructure;
• the role of the State and public policies;
• socio-spatial configurations, contradictions and urban conflicts;
• the strategies of production and financial valuation in construction and real estate firms.

The scientific relevance of this event lies on the the possibility of re-creating urban research, considering the real estate and the infrastructure jointly and articulating Sociology, Geography, Economy, Architecture and Urbanism. From the methodological point of view, the Seminar seeks to go beyond the product’s interpretation, encompassing the analysis of the production of the entire space. Urban society is already entering the 21st century and it is necessary to clearly establish what are the ways to better understanding real estate and infrastructures production.