Financialization and suburbanization: the predatory hegemony of suburban-financial nexus in Istanbul

ABSTRACT

The financialization of housing and the massive suburbanization in many parts of the world pose a plethora of significant problems that contribute to distortions of ecological balances (also known as the Anthropocene) which might reach an irreversible point. This work argues that the financialization of the suburban real estate market operates as a predatory formation. The theories of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) pave the way to understand how the suburbanization process in the twenty-first century has become one of the leading reasons of the Anthropocene. The task of UPE is to understand the political processes that shape, produce and reproduce the configuration of urban, nature and time. The latest suburbanization process has a special role in comprehending how processes and relations over the spatial configuration result in the collapse of ecological balances. This paper explores, through the case of Istanbul, how the financialization of housing market brings about a new ecological reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Financialization
• neoliberalism
• real estate capitalism
• suburbanization

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For further information you can check; https://ees.kuleuven.be/geography/projects/refcom/index.html. REFCOM is both a term coined and a research project conducted by Manuel Aalbers to identify the role of the state, finance and real estate actors in the financialization of housing. Aalbers uses this concept as both an approach that is akin to David Harvey’s industrial/military complex as a way of fixing economic crisis, and a way of scholarly examination of the financialization of housing within the framework of housing and critical urban studies.

2 Essentially, this has become a comparison demagogy in the rhetoric of government by signalling Berlin’s never finished new international airport. The new airport of Istanbul is presented as a triumph over Berlin’s failed project. Here the emphasis is on the time to build the mega-projects.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Murat Üçoğlu

Murat Ucoglu is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. He is co-editor of the book Massive suburbanization: (Re)building the global periphery published by University of Toronto. Currently, he also works as a Mitacs Research Fellow at York University.