Thomas Francis Purcell

The scale of the 21st-century urban housing challenge has prompted state actors in both the Global North and South to adopt increasingly interventionist approaches to ‘affordable’ housing production. This article draws on research in six cities (Shanghai, Nairobi, Paris, Casablanca, Salford and Rome) to discuss the changing relationship between housing, finance and the state through a global comparative perspective. It adopts an urban statecraft lens to examine affordable housing production as a site through which state actors engage with financialisation processes to different extents, leading to the reconfiguration of the state in the process. From this exploratory comparison, the paper identifies three dimensions of statecraft across which state-led affordable housing production can be analysed: state motivations to intervene; the forms of financial and institutional innovation adopted by policymakers; and strategies to redistribute and mitigate the risks associated with financialisation processes. In proposing these dimensions, the central contribution of the article is to establish an analytical framework for further empirical research on the uneven geographies of the global state-housing-finance nexus.

This commentary provides the contours of a Marxian critique of ‘assetization’. In doing so, the paper identifies a subjective approach to valuation and value which ties together Birch's and Ward's appeal to theoretical pluralism. The argument highlights how a focus on future-orientated valuation practices elide the question of class and production and, therefore, the very basis of rent and value. A call is made for geographers to better interrogate the relationship between rent and interest in the flurry of research around rentiership.

This paper contextualises the political economy of land value capture (LVC) within the shift to an increasingly financialised, rentier-dominated capitalism. Contributing to an emerging dialogue between social constructivist planning literature on performativity in LVC and the critical political economy literature on rents and rentiership, we overview Salford's planning policy trajectory in recent decades in order to highlight how the UK planning system has increasingly been reconfigured as a mechanism to increase land values. In doing so, we explore both Salford's shift to neoliberal planning and its municipal socialist counter-turn in recent years, reflecting on how the centrality of LVC to the latter still leaves it dependent on rentier logics. In doing so, we locate these policy conjunctures within the governance dynamics of Britain's transformation into a rentier economy; wherein the stimulation, disbursement and capture of land values have become central objects of spatio-economic policy.

Although recent years have seen an efflorescence of research on rent, the emphasis has tended to be placed in the antagonistic relations ofdistributionthat underlie this category. The ways in which rent relations also mediate the expansion of global networks of production and trade, however, are yet to be deciphered. On the other hand, an emerging scholarly interest in questions of logistics and supply chain capitalism has lacked a systematic theorisation of how increasing functional integration in the world economy shapes—and is also shaped by—rent relations. To bridge this gap, this article explores the complex, convoluted relation between property and the social circulation of capital in and beyond land markets. With this, we place into focus the extent to which the logistics revolution has elevated the importance of property relations—and thereby of the rentier class—in the dynamics of accumulation and political conflict under late‐stage capitalism.

Water infrastructure has been financed by differing combinations of private and public ownership throughout history and across different geographies. In the present moment, processes of financialization suggest a radical reconfiguration of these arrangements in a number of locations, such that water infrastructure is being transformed into a wealth extraction mechanism. In this Primer Article, we introduce financialization, showing how the term describes a process through which financial actors have gained new power and in which the locus of profit making at least appears to have shifted from the “real economy” to a financial economy. In the case of water infrastructure, processes of financialization have enabled apparently fixed and stable forms such as pipes, water treatment plants, and sewers to be transformed into liquid assets, opening up new opportunities for sovereign wealth funds and pension fund investors. The super‐profits made by these financial actors are best conceptualized as forms of rent, derived in part from the monopoly ownership of a basic need. This distinctive shift needs to be positioned in relation to broader changes in the political economy of water infrastructure. We situate financialization historically in relation to the development of water utilities and networks: municipalization and nationalization during the first decades of the 20th century, privatization since the 1990s, and renewed interest in remunicipalization in some places alongside the deepening logic of financialization in others. We conclude by thinking through the likely implication of water financialization for future infrastructural arrangements. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water Human Water > Water Governance Engineering Water > Planning Water

This paper explores the dialectical entanglements of the highly liquid and volatile trading of cocoa in its financial derivative form, and the small-scale, labour-intensive peasant production in its physical form. To do so this paper deploys financialization as a concept analytically subordinate to changes in global value relations which, we argue, shine a light on the internal relations between the global financial trading and local production of cocoa. Based upon detailed empirical research in the Ecuadorian cocoa sector, the paper demonstrates how the financialization of agro-industrial linkages have been internalized into uneven production relations between peasant producers facing low and volatile farm-gate prices, thereby producing a heterogeneous form of social class restructuring.

Drawing on the Marxian theory of ground rent, this paper develops an analysis of “global commodity chains” (GCCs) with agrarian roots. There is an acknowledgement that the concentrated downstream governance of primary commodity‐based GCCs has created a set of “asymmetrical” power relations which blocks the transmission of value upstream towards small producers. This paper argues that this research under‐specifies what is meant by value and rent, and in doing so marginalises the analysis of value production before its journey through inter‐firm relations. We demonstrate the importance of theorising the value constitution of commodities produced on the land and the forces that contest the payment of ground rent and thereby shape the geography of GCCs. Based on empirical research conducted around Ecuador's “post‐neoliberal” cocoa re‐activation plan, we identify the class politics and production mechanisms through which value and rent escapes the hands of a stratified network of small owner producers.