Not Available

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

Historicizing urban political economy: financialization, platformization, and the past and present of urban studies

Publication . Tulumello, Simone

This chapter engages with urban political economy through the lenses of recent discussions on housing financialization and platform urbanism. I discuss the contribution of urban political economy to understand the present predicament and its limits: on the one hand, a certain tendency to presentism – the risk of overemphasizing the peculiarity of the post-1970s conjuncture in detriment of an understanding of the recursive nature of certain trajectories of capitalist development, and a limited understanding of the politics of the present of urban change. On those grounds, I make a twofold call for the field: I advocate for a deeper historicization of urban political economy by engaging with Giovanni Arrighi’s long centuries and the genealogical gaze of critical logistical studies, and argue for a fully dialectical approach to the politics of urban political economy. In summary, I trace the contours of a conceptual project with both analytical and strategic value: analytical, in that it allows us to understand the present predicament as a peculiar iteration of recursive phenomena driven by dialectical struggles around social reproduction, and strategic, in that it contributes to de-fetishizing financialization and platformization, thereby opening up to a political imaginary capable of visualizing – and enacting – different futures.

2025Book part

Open access

Changing social movements in Lisbon? Housing financialisation and post-pandemic activism

Publication . Mendes, Luís; Tulumello, Simone

During the last decade, following years of austerity and rapid growth driven by tourism, real estate, and external investment, Lisbon has become a paradigmatic case of the financialisation/crisis nexus in the housing field. The simultaneous emergence and growth of social movements for the right to housing has been widely documented, with some accounts focusing on anti-financialisation struggles. In this article, we present the repertoires and claims of four activist groups and platforms born between 2022 and 2023 and discuss how Portuguese social movements are contending with the increasing centrality of financialisation in housing. In sum, we present three broad patterns of rescaling – intersectionality, internationalisation, and relations with political parties – in relation to the general endeavour to build a mass movement.

2024Journal article

Open access

Housing Financialization and the State, in and Beyond Southern Europe: A Conceptual and Operational Framework

Publication . Tulumello, Simone; Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Myrto

This article sets out a conceptual/operational framework designed to analyse how the state has enabled, promoted and shaped housing financialization. We build on the systematic analysis of literature and legislation in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, thereby providing an overview of housing financialization in Southern Europe. We identify six modes of housing financialization (mortgage debt, mortgage securitization, social rented housing, market rental housing, housing companies, “not-for-housing housing”), characterized by relative autonomy and specific mechanisms, plus a number of cross-cutting dimensions. Our conceptual/operational framework allows to systematically inquiry whether the state has passively adapted to global transformations or shaped these transformations in turn, therefore advancing two main contributions: first, contributing to a more precise conceptualization of the mechanisms of housing financialization; and, second, providing operational instruments to explore state action and policy in housing financialization beyond Southern Europe.

2024Journal article

Open access

Financiarización de la vivienda como acumulación territorial en la semiperiferia: un marco comparativo

Publication . Tulumello, Simone

Este artículo contribuye a conceptualizar la acumulación territorial centrándose en una dimensión específica, pero paradigmática: la financiarización de la vivienda en contextos semiperiféricos. Para ello esbozo los contornos principales de un marco comparativo y multiescalar sobre las distintas trayectorias regionales de la financiarización de la vivienda en Europa del Sur y América Latina, al tiempo que permanezco centrado en los caracteres específicos de la financiarización subordinada. Abordo una serie de dimensiones clave: las relaciones entre las formas de tenencia y las trayectorias de financiarización a largo plazo; la variada dinámica en la que ocurre la subordinación monetaria; el papel central, pero plural, del Estado; el rol recurrente de las instituciones internacionales; y los límites de las teorías centradas exclusivamente en las operaciones ‘formales’ de financiarización. En conclusión, abro la puerta a una reevaluación de las relaciones centro-periferia en la investigación sobre la financiarización de la vivienda.

2025Journal article

Open access

Infra-structural Violence: On the Violence that Holds Us Together

Publication . Pavoni, Andrea; Tulumello, Simone

How to define, and conceptualise, violence? This is a problem the social sciences and humanities have long wrestled with, often framing violence as an abstract, moral, and normative question, which prevented them from capturing its complexity. Violence, we suggest, is a tension force that is constitutive of, and immanent to, social, material, and spatial relations, simultaneously weaving them together and threatening to disrupt them. At the same time, violence cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon of an overarching process such as Capitalism: it does not simply result from the unfolding of structures and global processes; rather, it takes material existence in the frictional encounter with these very structures and processes. In this article, we build on, and push beyond, recent theorisations on infrastructure and infrastructural violence to introduce the concept of ‘infra-structural violence’ – where the hyphen emphasises the relational, tensional and somatic in-between – as a way to rework symbolic/economic notions of structural violence towards an ontological, epistemological and ethical ‘statics’ of violence, which is attuned to its disrupting, constructive, and preserving quality.

2024Journal article

Open access