Handbook on Financialization and Space

Combining scholars from around the world, this Handbook presents theories, methods and case studies that illuminate the far-reaching role of financial markets in the production of space. Focusing on the role of finance, it critically examines the uneven and conflictual geographies of contemporary capitalism.

Expert contributors critically investigate how land, housing, infrastructure and even nature are recast as assets for global investors. Drawing on case studies spanning agribusiness regions in Brazil, earthquake-stricken villages in Nepal and Canadian forests and mines, the authors trace the contours, actors and power relations of planetary financialization. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, they advance a spatial and socioecological lens exposing how the planet, in all its socio-ecological dimensions, has become the terrain of financial markets’ extractive practices, as well as the frictions, contradictions and limits that unsettle them.

This Handbook is a crucial resource for scholars, students and researchers of human and financial geography, urban and economic sociology, architecture and planning, as well as anthropology and political science. Its coverage of urban development and socio-environmental (de)regulation also makes this essential reading for activists and policymakers concerned with the socio-environmental consequences of financialization.