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.