Post-Crash Cities

Housing Financialisation, late-Neoliberalism and Community Responses

The increased intertwining of finance and real estate was a prelude to and intimately bound up with the global economic crisis, yet the aftermath has been particularly dynamic as new roles are cast for private-equity firms and other financial actors in the ‘for-rent’ residential sector and as states engineer new policies to further affirm the treatment of housing as a financial asset. One upshot of these new post-crash configurations of cities has been to accentuate sharply the vulnerability of urban communities, left with fewer state protections and buffers to resist urban marginalization.

This workshop brings together the latest theories and empirical findings in the research field surrounding contemporary cities and late-neoliberalism, taking into account the ‘aftermath’ of the global economic crisis and its different implications – from political-economic arrangements to more micro consequences for urban communities, such as housing accessibility crises, marginalized citizenries and raising socio-spatial segregation. It does so with a multi-disciplinary approach that seeks to better unify geographical, economic, political, sociological and anthropological understandings of the intertwining of global processes of financialisation of housing and gentrification with neoliberal urban policies at different scales.

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

DAY 1 – MAY 8

15:30-18:30. Field excursion in Dublin’s Liberties (Click here for details and to register!)

Led by Lidia K.C. Manzo

DAY 2 – MAY 9

9:00. Registration

9:30. Opening Welcome and Workshop Overview

Sinéad Kelly and Lidia Manzo (Department of Geography, MU)

9:45-12:40. The Financialization of Housing and Real Estate

Chair: Sinéad Kelly

9:45-11:05 Keynotes presentations

Key lecture 1: Manuel Aalbers (KU Leuven) - The Financialization of the City

Key lecture 2: Amy Horton (University College London) - Home, work and care in financialised space

11:05-11:20 Coffee break

11:20-12:40 Workshop Presentations

Chair: Michael Murphy (Department of Geography, MU)

• Michael Byrne (UCD) - The decline of homeownership and financialization of the private rental sector: limits of financialization?
• Declan Redmond (UCD) and Richard Waldron (Queen’s University Belfast) - The Trojan Horse of ‘Viability’ and the Recasting the Irish Planning System
• Dáithí Downey (Dublin City Council) - Sustainablility, Affordability and Choice: Towards a Cost Rental and Unitary Rental System
• Sinéad Kelly (Department of Geography, MU) - Governing by finance: the new logics and consequences of urban policy in post-crash cities

12:40-13:20. Cities in late-Neoliberalism

Discussant: Philip Lawton (Trinity College Dublin)

Key lecture 3: Ugo Rossi (Turin University) - The urban condition under late neoliberalism: neoliberal resiliency and its political consequences

13:20-14:20. Lunch break

14:20-17:00. Housing Rights, Austerity and Community

Chair: Lidia Manzo

14:20-15:20 Keynotes presentations

Key lecture 4: Marie Antoinette Glaser and Eveline Althaus (ETH Zurich) - Building sustainable communities in a growing city. Challenges from the Swiss housing reality

15:20-17:00 Workshop Presentations

Discussant: Ela Drazkiewicz (Department of Anthropology, MU)

• Rory Hearne (MU Social Sciences Institute) - Crisis without end? Financialisation, inequality and the right to housing in post-crisis Ireland
• Cian O’Callaghan (TCD), Cesare Di Felicantonio (University of Leicester), and Michael Byrne (UCD) - Governing urban vacancy in post-crash Dublin: contested property and alternative social projects
• Rachel McArdle (NIRSA & Geography, MU) - Apollo House and the Irish Housing Network as examples of the changing nature and politics of housing activism
• Sander van Lanen (University of Groningen) - Austere lifeworlds: austerity urbanism and multiple exclusion for youth from marginalised neighboudhoods
• Lidia Manzo (Department of Geography, MU) – ‘People helping one another when you have nothing’. How ethnography still counters myths about the urban poor after the crash.

17:00-17:15 Coffee break

17:15-18:00. Roundtable with Keynotes

Manuel Aalbers, Eveline Althaus, Marie Antoinette Glaser, Amy Horton, and Ugo Rossi

Discussant: Eoin O’Mahony (UCD)

Chair: Gerry Kearns (Department of Geography, MU)