Financialization of housing in Southern Europe : the role of the state

Critical geography and political economy have long assumed that the financialization of housing is a process especially typical of global cities of the North. More recently, increasing attention has been dedicated to financialization in the Global South as well (e.g. Aalbers et al., 2020). Manuel Aalbers (2019, p. 377), however, has recently argued that ‘housing financialization, or any other form of financialization for that matter, is not primarily about showing which place is more financialized; it is about understanding the process by which financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives are increasingly becoming dominant’. In other words, a regional approach is not so much relevant in terms of creating global ‘rankings’ of financialized cities and places, but to the extent that it allows to explore the forms and ways through which (global) capital intermingle and struggle with local institutional, social and political arrangements