Economic holdings and housing financialization in Latin American cities

IVANA SOCOLOFF

Budapest

Congreso; The financialization of housing in the semi-periphery; 2018

CEU

In a recent article, Christophers (2017) draws attention to the need to address the study of the financialization of the state through the lens of how national states are treating their own ´public estate´. Complementing other works on the public disposition of rural land and on the selling of public land by local states, the author wonders if national states are treating their own land as a financial asset and with what implications. Following his inquiries, we aim to contribute to the study of the financialization, by presenting an analysis of the way in which Argentine state has treated its public land in recent years and how big national and international holdings are using it within their larger strategies.Our questions arise from the fact that for the first time in history, the national state has deployed a policy of privatization and centralization of the management of all public estate, possible only through the incorporation of new technologies. To explore these inquiries we base our study on an analysis of regulations, observations, interviews and archival work that allowed the identification of modalities of land treatment and motivations. We argue that national authorities have privatized land under the premise that it has no ?use value? for public institutions. In such a way that, to us, financialization has penetrated the logic of State agencies, which are treating land as another asset class. However, and as a concomitant process, this logic has not annulled other traditional ones of control and government over the national territory through land. On the other hand, far from being companies with a high degree of specialization in the real estate sector, local holdings with certain tradition in the construction sector and infrastructure production along with international funds have acquired big stakes of urban land, especially in the city of Buenos Aires. All of which tells a story of five decades of privatization / appropriation of land but with different modalities of disposition and transformations of agents involved.