Real Estate Financialization in Argentina

SOCOLOFF, IVANA

LYON

Congreso; Ecole de l?Anthropocène; 2023

Université de Lyon

In line with our discussion here today and bringing back some of the Latin American perspective into the table gathered in the book. Rachel has just explained us precisely how cities are the target of finance capital, how local goverments plan and govern through finance, how financial actors and government agencies become “entangled”. Through my research I have focused on studying financialization in other locations, on how it has shaped the strategies of large developers in Argentina. But in this presentation, my plan is to show more general trends about financialization in the periphery. So I want to start by saying that not only the real estate sector has gotten more and more complex due to the increasing role of multiple actors working at different geographical scales and in many locations, but also the construction-real estate-financial industry has been progressively concentrated. Also, as Rachel mentioned, developers not only use finance to build the city, developers incorporate/anticipate the rationalities of the financial sector. But unlike in the case of Chicago or Lyon, developers outside core cities are forced to deal with an extremely volatile and changing financial environment, with fluxes of capital that appear and disappear, hence forced to reinvent their strategies very often. Through my research I have tried to refine the lenses to look at how the global and the local are connected, especially in the Global South where financial systems are, in many cases, unstable and full of uncertainties… where trust and long term are regularly questioned.