The contradictions of mediation: intermediaries and the financialization of urban production

Abstract

This paper uses a case study of an Indian real estate investment fund to understand the financialization of urban production. It argues that chains of intermediaries transform fixed, illiquid parcels of land into financial assets open to mobile capital. By investigating how such chains are made, it highlights the agency of the actors who build them. Yet, an examination of the fund's failure in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis demonstrates that the intermediaries that capitalists rely on in order to make liquidity possible can actually generate risks and slow transactions, contributing to illiquidity. Thus, to understand the financialization of urban production, we must take into account the ways in which such contradictions of mediation shape dynamics of spatial fixity and capital mobility.