Territorial dispossession under financialised capitalism and its discontents: insurgent spatialities and legal forms

Abstract

The financialisation of land and housing marks a new empire colonising the urban landscape in which territories are increasingly captured and populations are dislocated and dispossessed. Under this model of urban development, the link between capital and built space has reached unprecedented scale and speed by mobilising new legal, political and economic instruments. In this article, we examine how law constitutes and operates this link by enabling a true domination of finance over built space. At the foundation of the connection between space and finance lies the liberal idea of private property, which has historically modulated the territorial organisation of cities and established borders between the city and its margins. Identified all over the world as outcast and subnormal, the urban margins are stigmatised, criminalised and racialised places which are under permanent threat and, simultaneously, functional to the real estate financial capital. Performing the role of preferred territories to be used as new frontiers of capital expansion, these places can be deeply marked by violence and destruction in the name of legality. But in addressing this scenario, it is important to recognise that the city is under dispute and, beyond the capture of territories by finance, there is also a permanent movement of emplacements, generating landscapes for life. Different resistance experiences in cities around the world, with their use of insurgent tactics such as occupations, communal forms of ownership and other collective and complex bonds with land, perform blockages against the referred submission of built space to finance. We argue that, in this ‘urban warfare’, space is not the scenery where battles take place, but rather the object of these battles itself. In this context, insurgent spatialities and legal forms emerge as key collective processes of building new forms of urban life.

Keywords:

• Urban policies
• financial capital
• built space
• urban margins
• property law
• insurgent spatialities

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and editors of City whose insightful comments were decisive for improving this article. We thank also CNpq ( Brazilian National Research Agency) for Raquel Rolnik's Research Scholarship (Produtividade em Pesquisa 1C) and FAPERJ for Moniza Rizzini Ansari's PDN10 Research Scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This essay is the result of an exchange between the three authors that started in 2019 at the conference ‘Law at the Margins of the City’, organised by Carolina Amadeo and Moniza Rizzini Ansari at Birkbeck School of Law—University of London. It has been developed from the keynote address given by Raquel Rolnik opening the event, which also marked the UK launch of her book, Urban Warfare (Verso 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raquel Rolnik

Raquel Rolnik is a professor in The School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. Email: [email protected]

Carolina Amadeo

Carolina Amadeo is a PhD candidate at the School of Law in Birkbeck College, University of London. Email: [email protected]

Moniza Rizzini Ansari

Moniza Rizzini Ansari is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ, PDR10). Email: [email protected]