Experiments of real estate financialization: large developers and real estate funding under financial subordination

SOCOLOFF, IVANA

Exposición; FINGEO Network, Webminar; 2022

FINGEO Network

This presentation will focus on the role of financialization in shaping the strategies of large developers. In that regard, one must say that developers have been the object of research -especially in the Global South- since the seventies.But a current debate has recently called for a more nuanced view of the developer. Authors have proposed that by looking at the "real work of developers" and their agency, one should be careful about the role of finance and financialization in this process. For them and for several other authors, financial actors are not necessarily present in funding projects (Ballard and Butcher, 2019), nor are they the instigators of developments. On the same line, Jullie Pollard argues that financialization and privatization are not the right lenses to look at the housing sector dynamics in France. For her, a changing policy landscape better explains developers' empowerment and strategies. As well as the role of local government, officials maintained a sort of relative autonomy in planning. But although I am particularly sympathetic to these nuanced views, I am left wondering about how to explain some more general trends, such as the empowerment of developers and the existence of transcalar agents participating in the most advanced projects. To me, there is a global phenomenon behind these trends, such as neoliberalism (public-private partnerships, collaborative planning), financialization, austerity, or the reinforcing effect of all of them as Felix Adisson & Ludovic Halbert have stated in a recent paper.