A Manifesto for the Just City 2021 48 // 404
COMMMODIFICATION & FINANCIALISATION OF THE CITY PROFESSOR MARIANA FIX UNIVERSITY OF SAO PAULO
I will talk today about the capitalist city and the production of urban space under neoliberalism and financialisation (or finance-led globalisation) from a point of view constituted in the global south, with a historiographical approach. For this, I’m going to make special use of an article written with Pedro Fiori Arantes titled “On urban studies in Brazil: The favela, uneven urbanisation and beyond.”(Fix & Arantes, 2021). This article was written at the suggestion of the journal editors, Vanessa Watson and Ronan Paddison, who critically dialogued with us throughout the writing process with academic rigour and much generosity. My remarks are also based on research I have carried out on the theme of housing, urban entrepreneurship planning models, real estate, finance capital and financialisation, gentrification and Public Private Partnerships, over the last 3 decades. In doing so, I hope to contribute to the debate on commodification and financialisation by discussing how recent changes I’ve been trying to map affect capitalist urbanisation. Examined in its planetary dimension and in a longterm perspective, capitalist urbanisation has always expanded in a violent, uneven and predatory way. Therefore, expanding the visibility of Southern theories and practices is not only a means of upholding
epistemological diversity but above all, a way of contributing to the broad critical field [of urban studies] since “events and ideas in the south are powerful for understanding the world as a whole, not only the south” (Mabin, 2014, p. 24). Thus, I begin by briefly revisiting a set of hypotheses produced by different generations of authors in the field of urban studies in Brazil. Seemingly chaotic Latin American cities’ landscapes and their history reveal how capitalism unfolds and develops in our continent. This apparent chaos has a rationality behind it. Behind the superficial chaos lies systemic inequity in the distribution of the benefits of urbanisation and of the social reproduction of labour. These disparities are not merely a reflection of social inequalities, but are accentuated by spatial segregation, social control and strategies aimed at the appreciation of real estate values. The effort to dissect the forms of production of the built environment is important for any project of social transformation, especially in the context of planetary urbanisation. Brazilian intellectuals and scholars have formulated original theories to explain the country’s urbanisation processes, relating urban issues to the more general problems of uneven development in a post-colonial and imperialist context. At the same time, urban Social Struggles produced relevant practices of social resistance and mobilisation, which oppose hegemonic urban planning projects guided by entrepreneurship and the commodification of the city. The historiographical approach favours the
Professor Mariana Fix. Photo by Joana Fix. Printed with permission.
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t is a great responsibility to speak at such a relevant event, with an engaged and informed audience, from 100 different universities, preceded by Professors Faranak Miraftab and Mona Fawaz.
