2 minute read
De-territorialisation of Extraction
from Emergence of Institutional Investors in Post-Crisis Housing Markets in Manchester, UK
by Nagaoka
extraction. These “global apparatus of extraction” (Arboleda, 2020:14) evident in Fields’ study of technologically activated logistic advancements inform “polarizing tendencies of uneven geographical development [that] are no longer exclusively confined to the international political relations of the nation-state” (Arboleda, 2020: 23). Financial liberation of global financial actors through nation-state de-regulation enables global property acquisition where financial extraction becomes the primary mode of operation for housing provision. Reconfiguration of the housing market as a financially extractive industry therefore mutates the house into a site of extraction, or ‘mine’.
“Understanding the mine as an interconnected system of spatial technologies and infrastructures allows for superseding the superficial appearance of spaces of extraction as exclusively exclusively fragmented and sclerotic.” (Arboleda, 2020: 21)
Advertisement
Additionally, commenting upon methodological nationalism (Arboleda, 2020) the “dynamics of primary-commodity production” (Arboleda, 2020:21) become isolated from world-systems theories and “more adequately conceptualized as the fetishized form of expression of a process whose content transcends an interstate system of political actors with apparent autonomy”. (Arboleda, 2020:21) Dually retaining theories of State involvement with partial abandonment of nation-state significance, the empirical chapters detail transformations of cityregional political ecology establishing new de-territorialised financial circuitry. Emphasis is placed upon immaterial architectures serving these infrastructures, as “the consumption of the city cannot be analytically separated from its production.” (Pierce and Hankins, 2019: 1530)
The Course of Capitalism: The Right To Buy Rent
Summarising the literature review, the first wave of housing financialisation which cemented homes as assets resulted in the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Resulting in the devaluation of an existing spatial fix, dispossessing millions. (Harvey, 2014) As mortgage credit became constrained, rental hegemonies emerge as housing accessibility is restricted by ever-rising housing prices. (Rolnik, 2019) Following the accumulation of vast property portfolios by institutional investors, acquiring homes for financial extraction, the infrastructures required to support novel modes of accumulation are constructed de-territorialising these extractive
financial operations.
Magnifying towards the case study of Manchester, the presence of institutional landlords were not significant until the post-crisis coalition government became “seriously engaged in promoting their entry” (Rolnik, 2019:274) through the publishing of ‘the Montague report’ (Rolnik, 2019) which proposes a series of recommendations for increased deregulation of the Private Rented Sector. This model of housing delivery encouraged by the coalition government is referred to as the ‘Manchester Model’ (Peck and Ward, 2002) as demonstration of this partnership has been proven ‘successful’ in several neighbourhood regeneration projects in Manchester since the 1992 Hulme Regeneration project. (Peck and Ward, 2002)
