Workshop
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.
In general, financialization has been treated by three main approaches in the international literature: as a regime of capital accumulation, as the emergence of shareholder value as the main guiding principle of corporate behaviour and as the financialization of everyday life (van der Zwan, 2014; Aalbers, 2016). More specifically, in relation to urban studies, financialization has been studied by four main schools: real estate economics, urban infrastructure, public policies and housing (Attuyer and Halbert, 2016).
In common, these studies reveal that the city is not only financed and produced by historical urban actors, such as owners, developers, builders, State, banks and, often, inhabitants (Lorrain, 2011). One of the major transformations is related to the progressive increase in the role of financial investors in the conception of major urban and redevelopment projects.
Even in relation to historical actors, it is possible to notice adaptations and changes in their logics and practices within this financialized context, whether they are private (e.g. the developers - Coulondre, 2016) or public (e.g. local governments - Weber, 2015). Aalbers (2016) points out that housing is a less studied topic in the financialization debate, but that has been gaining prominence in recent years considering the post-subprime crisis context and the works related to overpriced and overextended loans, mortgage securitization, land use planning, private serviced residences, and subsidized housing.
Parallel to this European debate, Latin American literature has also been focusing on the analysis of heterogeneity in the forms of production and consumption of urbanization in the region (Pirez, 2016). The intensification of real estate production and the expansion of infrastructure investments in Latin American countries, besides reinforcing the importance of these activities to the comprehension of broader urban and territorial changes, 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, who can fight against inequality - which in the Latin American case is structural - or seek to benefit from it. In this sense, there are studies that associate real estate cycles and economic crises (Daher, 2013; Socollof, 2015), real estate valuation and urban metamorphosis (Mattos, 2016), State and private agents in urban infrastructure production and management (Conolly, 2015, Catenazzi, 2013).
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 and other institutional mechanisms that boosted this sector, has nourished an academic field recently. On the one hand, there are researches on the approximation between real estate and finance, emphasizing the circuits of capital and the territorial effects of real estate activities (Fix, 2011, Sanfelici, 2013, Hoyler, 2014, Rufino, 2016). On the other hand, the production of housing and the strategies of large companies from the construction site to entrepreneurial management have been gaining prominence as some primary objects of analysis (Moura, 2011; Shimbo, 2012; Baravelli, 2017). In addition, there are works that explain the financialization of urban production (Sanfelici and Halbert, 2015; Rolnik, 2015) and of housing policy (Royer, 2014).
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, according to two main axes: 1) Circuits of capital, actors and conflicts in the reconfiguration of cities; 2) State, real estate development and financial valuation
In methodological terms, this Workshop is organized in two different moments. The first moment will take place in the morning and is organized in conferences of international speakers followed by round table with international and national participants, who are all references in the contemporary debate on urban space production and financialization. The mornings will be closed by a debate seeking to ensure an analytical articulation with the issues proposed here. The second moment will be composed of three Working Sessions, in which the Scientific Committee will choose 15 papers on the theme of the event, seeking to identify final and ongoing research in Brazil, Latin America and Europe and to increase academic interlocution among young researchers. At the end, there will be a closing conference followed by a general discussion, with a chairperson of the event coordination, which will seek to synthesize issues presented at the event and to discuss future research agendas.