From the Garden City and cooperative movements to self-help housing and community land trusts (CLTs), radical experiments in collective dweller control aim to protect use values and fix in place increasingly mobile capital for long-term community benefit. This research critically explores how such mutual alternatives might provide the basis for more effective, democratic and self-sustaining urban regeneration, to resolve wicked problems of housing deprivation and inner-city decline, where conventional state and market-led approaches have failed. It examines how specific experiments emerged and developed in Liverpool, a city with a particularly rich history of mutual housing experimentation; in part a reaction to decades of urban decline, deprivation, deteriorating housing conditions, and displacement. The focus is on Liverpool?s 1970s co-op movement and contemporary CLT campaigns. Co-ops and CLTs are conceptualised as common ownership institutions distinct from public and private property; as ?social innovations? in land reform aiming to find socially empowering new solutions to old problems. Drawing on Lefebvre?s theory of the production of space, the thesis advances a more spatialised and historicised reading of social innovation as ?spatial projects? dialectically produced through place-based practices and competing logics.Liverpool provides an illustrative case study of the social, political and institutional dynamics of how mutual housing experiments emerge, institutionalise, fail, or replicate. Methodologically, this thesis employs a qualitative case study comparison of various campaigns emerging in the Liverpool city-region since 1960. A genealogical approach traces connections between radical moments, drawing on documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. Urban political economy informs the contextualisation of these moments within Liverpool?s changing governance structure of state, market and third sector institutions. The research aims to identify the motivations, catalysts, drivers, barriers, opportunities and constraints shaping the development of mutual housing alternatives in this historical-geographical context, as a means for understanding broader political prospects. Empirical findings suggest that mutual housing development is a complex, conflictual and highly political socio-spatial process, with often unexpected and contradictory outcomes. Nonetheless, there were clear benefits produced by the co-op movement: socioeconomic and political empowerment of residents; democratically-designed community-owned housing that remains durable, easy to manage, and responsive to local needs; and lasting improvements to urban environments. But this often entailed exclusions at higher scales, and relied on generous state funding, proving politically unsustainable. Liverpool?s CLTs are potentially more democratic and self-sustaining vehicles for neighbourhood regeneration; reimagining and transforming place in extraordinary ways. The findings reveal that the CLT model was originally introduced to Liverpool through state-led projects, scoping out the possibility of incorporating CLTs as succession vehicles for regeneration programmes. These experiments failed partly due to local state fears over loss of control of public assets; partly through lack of resident involvement, suggesting CLTs require democratic mandate and grassroots participation. The most successful campaigns were funded through public arts and private philanthropy, grown from the grassroots by a local ?creative class? of artist-activists, potentially enacting arts-led or eco-gentrification, posing questions over public accountability. For mutual housing to resolve urban problems, more systematic development is required, supported by state-funded decentralised professional support networks.

Mutual housing alternatives and the neighbourhood question: A critical history of social innovation for urban transformation in Liverpool 1960?2015

This thesis is the first geographical study which critically explores the role of urban air rights - the right to build upwards on and above a land tract – in processes of urban financialization. The thesis highlights the economic lives of air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area, Taiwan, showing how they are not only a market-based urban policy and planning tool but are also closely involved in economic processes of making markets, assets, and profits. Three types of urban air rights - Bonus Floor Area (BFA), Transferable Development Rights (TDR) and Incremental Floor Area (IFA) – that are prevalent in urban Taipei are explored in detail. The thesis examines the relations between the proliferation of air rights production and urban financialization through an experimental methodology of ‘following urban air rights’ through the socio-technical operations of their assembly and circulation. It argues that air rights are ‘market devices’ and, as such, they are constitutive of the contingent processes of commodification, marketization and capitalization that amount to urban financialization. Through case studies, the thesis shows how airspaces are commodified and, significantly, how they also become an asset class that is marketized and traded and/or capitalized upon and borrowed against (i.e. leveraged). Moreover, by exploring these processes, the thesis shows how air rights ‘overflow’ into popular urban politics: air rights become a site of struggle over rights to the financialized city. More broadly, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates on urban financialization by examining how the urban-finance nexus is teeming with socio-technical practices. By focusing on air rights as market devices, the thesis provides an analytical grammar for studying how urban air rights constitute urban financialization. It also demonstrates how a methodology of ‘following the air rights’ enables exploration of the multifaceted qualities and multiple markets that air rights configure.

Urban air rights as market devices : exploring financialization in Taipei Metropolitan Area

On the 4 April 2006, a municipal council was dissolved for the first time in the democratic history of Spain, making the housing crisis financially and politically apparent. In the Mediterranean town of Marbella politicians had been adapting the boundary between building land and the coastal commons to their own interests. The power to quantify and reclassify buildable space was at the core of an architectural struggle, as urban planning and the provision of housing had been designed upon the ambiguity of the highest tide in history. Since the 1988 Coastal Law, the Spanish shoreline has not been demarcated in its entirety yet: evictions and eminent domain have trapped the littoral commons in Court. Every twist of the shoreline reveals not where tides are active, but rather where landscape margins are entangled with real estate profit margins. This research investigates speculation and the housing crisis by using the materiality of the shoreline to understand dwelling struggles. The calculated construction of ambiguity in the demarcation of the littoral is analysed as a form of control and a form of resistance. Structured in three chapters, the practice-based research departs from the invention of the coastline in Spain to unpack the financialisation of space and the appropriation of the common good within the housing crisis. It investigates how the provision of ‘affordable’ homes as financial instruments relies on the global circulation of natural capital, coastal wetlands and offsetting operations. Through case studies in Europe and the US, it investigates the engineering of the shoreline by insurance companies after ‘natural disasters’ and the circumvention of mortgage debt offshore. Embedded in an analysis of housing from a critical finance perspective, this thesis demonstrates how rather than territorial boundaries being a circulation of capital, it is capital what needs to be read as a constant circulation of zoning laws and ambiguous borderlines, in order to anticipate alternative futures to housing inequality.

Financial littorals : the architecture of profit margins and ambiguous lands

ix List of Acronyms xi List of Figures xii List of Tables xiv CHAPTER

Towards a theory of urban design under neoliberalism design

..................................................................................................................... i DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................ v LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER

Commodifying urban space : the case of branded housing projects in Istanbul, Turkey

Over the last few decades we have witnessed a global U-turn in prevailing housing and urban policy agendas, spread around the world by the driving forces of globalization and neoliberalism. The new paradigm was mainly based on the withdrawal of states from the housing sector and the implementation of policies designed to create stronger and larger market-based housing finance models. The commodification of housing, together with the increased use of housing as an investment asset within a globalized financial market, has profoundly affected the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing. Taking the World Bank's 1993 manifesto as a starting point and the subprime crisis as its first great international flashpoint, this essay traces some key elements of the neoliberal approach to housing and its impact on the enjoyment of the right to housing in different contexts and times. The reform of housing policy — with all its components of homeownership, private property and binding financial commitments — has been central to the political and ideological strategies through which the dominance of neoliberalism is maintained. Conversely, the crisis (and its origins in the housing market) reflects the inability of market mechanisms to provide adequate and affordable housing for all.

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/5001824.pdf

Neoliberalismo reciente: la FinanCializaCiónde la vivienda propia y el dereCho a la vivienda* Late NeoliBeralism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights

Durante estas ultimas decadas hemos sido testigos de un global giro en U de las prevalentes agendas de vivienda y politica urbana esparcidas por el mundo por las fuerzas de la globalizacion y del neoliberalismo. El nuevo paradigma se baso, principalmente, en la retirada de los Estados del sector de la vivienda, y de la implementacion de politicas disenadas para crear modelos mas fuertes y amplios de financiacion de la vivienda con un enfoque de mercado. La mercantilizacion de la vivienda, junto con la aumentada utilizacion de esta como inversion dentro de un mercado financiero globalizado, ha afectado profundamente al disfrute del derecho a la vivienda adecuada. Tomando el manifiesto del Banco Mundial de 1993 como un punto de partida, y la crisis del subprime como el primer gran punto de ignicion internacional, este ensayo rastrea algunos elementos claves del enfoque del neoliberalismo para la vivienda y sus impactos en el disfrute del derecho a la vivienda en diferentes contextos y tiempos. La reforma de la politica de vivienda –con todos sus componentes de tenencia, propiedad privada y el amarre de compromisos financieros–ha sido central en las estrategias politicas e ideologicas a traves de las cuales se mantiene el dominio del neoliberalismo. De la misma manera, la crisis (y sus origenes en el mercado de la vivienda) refleja la inhabilidad de los mecanismos del mercado para proveer vivienda adecuada y accesible para todos.

Neoliberalismo reciente: la financialización de la vivienda propia y el derecho a la vivienda. El pensamiento de Raquel Rolnik en el marco del Séptimo Foro Urbano Mundial en Medellín

Luis Dapena

Papers

Neoliberalismo reciente: la FinanCializaCiónde la vivienda propia y el dereCho a la vivienda* Late NeoliBeralism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights

Neoliberalismo reciente: la financialización de la vivienda propia y el derecho a la vivienda. El pensamiento de Raquel Rolnik en el marco del Séptimo Foro Urbano Mundial en Medellín