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Curated Track: Economic Geography Specialty Group Highlights and Crisis, Inequality, and Left-Behind Places

Description:

Over the last two decades, a rollercoaster ride of fiscal and financial crises has left cities and states reliant on financial markets to fund social goods. Capital, though, comes at a cost. Bargaining with investors has meant that the largest source of public wealth in a country-government-owned land and property-is increasingly on offer to the highest bidder. As the state's holdings morph into a portfolio of assets, it is ultimately communities who depend on public land and services that bear the brunt of these new state property regimes.

The financialization of the state's estate occurs in many forms and across most property types. Housing, schools, office buildings, forests, and agricultural lands are but a few of the property types targeted for a bevy of recent financialized strategies. Selling property erases capital assets from a state's balance sheet but reduces the state to a tenant and eliminates public services. Active portfolio management, on the other hand, packages property into investible objects and monetizes cash flows, while intergovernmental transfers pass the burden of property ownership downwards. Realizing any of these outcomes depends on a mix of politically charged discourses like 'surplus' and 'inefficiencies' to remake public property into assets, valuation techniques that monetize it, and market making to circulate it. Diverse financial strategies and techniques at work in government-owned property hint at the uneven, variegated, and even contradictory features that characterize the financialization of the state.

Investigating the evolution of the government's footprint invites larger questions about where the state is, who it serves, and what exactly it governs in the 21st century. In that spirit, this session seeks to bring together scholars and researchers working across the globe on issues related to new state property regimes at any scale. We welcome papers that make empirical and/or theoretical contributions into the relationship between the state, finance, and property markets. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- New geographies of state-owned properties;
- Novel forms of state tenure;
- Public real estate investment vehicles and funds;
- Public real estate markets and market-making;
- Deal structuring and legal frameworks used in public-private arrangements;
- Inter-scalar property transfers;
- Privatization and/or surplus property policies;
- Public asset valuation techniques;
- Case studies of public land that run counter to austerity discourses;
- Contestation and dissent over privatization policies and projects.

Non-Presenting Participants